PHP had become almost a forgotten language with a lapse of more than 10 years without a new major version after PHP 5.0 in 2004. To make things worse, PHP 6.x was abandoned because of a planned addition of native Unicode support to PHP that could not be implemented. Yet, PHP is one of the most used language for Cloud development and an option available on most cloud service providers.
PHP 7.x brings several improvements and new features that touch all aspects of the language, including better support for object oriented programming, extensions to classes and interfaces, improvements to the type system, error handling, and more.
In this series of articles, we discuss the new features across the various PHP 7.x versions.
Series Contents
PHP 7 - Getting Started and OOP Improvements
Set the environment for PHP 7.x and find how it is more object-oriented, with support for a new data type called, well "object".
PHP 7 - Classes and Interfaces Improvements
Get to know anonymous classes. Also, PHP 7 introduces more extensible classes with full support for Contravariance and Covariance.
PHP 7 - New Features for Types
More typed with scalar type declarations for strings, integers, floating-point numbers, and booleans, and return type declarations, and typed properties.
PHP 7 – Standard Library Improvements
Several new functions, and new features for some of the existing functions. Support for anonymous classes brings PHP in-line with some of the other object-oriented languages, such as C++ and Java.
PHP 7 - Improvements to Arrays, Operators, Constants, and Exception Handling
A few new operators, improved readability with flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc, and enhanced exception handling with support for multiple exceptions in the same catch block of a try/catch statement.
Series Author
Deepak Vohra is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Sun Certified Web Component Developer. Deepak has published Java and Java EE related technical articles in WebLogic Developer's Journal, XML Journal, ONJava, java.net, IBM developerWorks, Java Developer’s Journal, Oracle Magazine, and devx. Deepak has published five books on Docker and is a Docker Mentor. Deepak has also published several articles on PHP and a book Ruby on Rails for PHP and Java Developers.
