5 Reasons Why PHP7 is Awesome

PHP 7 is a revolution all along the way to empower the web. It is time to get up and learn PHP 7. PHP 7 has covered all the loopholes of the earlier version release. The substantial shift to these newest updates makes it awesome. It is a great step towards performance improvements, reduced memory consumption, and other prominent feature enhancement.

The features are enhanced and new things in it make it blazing. The most prominent one is the Zend Engine 3.0 which doubles the performance in terms of processing as well as memory consumption than in previous versions.

I am going to discuss in detail what makes PHP7 awesome.

The certified PHP distribution stack with new developing, debugging, monitoring, and deploying tools gives you an efficient path to PHP 7. With the Zend Engine 3.0 ( the open-source execution engine written in C, that interprets the code), you can have 50% better memory consumption.

The testing practices you can do in PHP 7 are more than awesome. The perfect testing environment will ensure you the best quality assurance practices so that you will deliver the most secure and tested product to your clients.

This is only because of the Zend Server that will come up with a variety of testing tools, the latest code tracing, Z-Ray Zend’s productivity, and debugging tools.

The V7 PHP is tremendous in programming practices and performance. The overall LAMP stack constitutes PHP as a prominent part of it.

The updated programming practices are:

• If you want to import many classes from the same namespace, then “Group Use Declaration” will facilitate you. It results in easier, cleaner, and also saves time while coding. Like,

// New group use syntax in PHP7: 

use FooLibrary\Bar\Baz\{ ClassA, ClassB, ClassC, Class-D as Fizbo}; 

// Compared to the current use syntax in Earlier Versions: 

use FooLibrary\Bar\Baz\ClassA; 

use FooLibrary\Bar\Baz\ClassB; 

use FooLibrary\Bar\Baz\ClassC; 

use FooLibrary\Bar\Baz\ClassD as Fizbo;

• The deprecated functionality has been eliminated. All the older functions are omitted which causes non-responsive and illegal memory consumption. The functions that are obsolete now may be the unsupported Server APIs and extensions.

For instance, the following extensions are now considered deprecated.

1. ext/ereg (since PHP 5.3; use ext/pcre instead),
2. ext/MySQL (since PHP 5.5; use ext/mysqli or ext/pdo_mysql instead).

They are not workable or will be cut from the PHP 7. x

Likewise many functions, in options, language features, unbundled extensions, assignment of new expressions by references, and ma,ny other functions are mentioned here.

1. PHP 7 lets you use Anonymous classes. This approach was adopted by C# and Java. The main benefit of using the anonymous class is, you can use the object having the same functionality as the anonymous class. The name is missing for that type of class. So, as a result, we’ll have well-coded, and speedy object initiation via using the Anonymous classes.
2. You can return an instance and anything you need now.
3. The new operators are introduced that can work on it like:

$a<$b is equivalent to

($a⇔$b)===-1)

Check also to find a useful comparison for your next startup about Node.JS vs PHP.

So, we have the concept of combined comparison operators, which will give you a more detailed and simpler approach to code now. Moreover, the NULL Coalescing Operator is meant to use in situations where you need to add the conditional operators, or any conditional statements and want the result like:

$model= Model::get($id)??$define_model;

The ‘??’  operator will semantically return the value of the devised condition.

As another example, you can say that by using the NULL Coalescing Operators, it is written as:

$username=$GET[‘user’] ?? ’nobody’;

But in the earlier version that was not introduced and this statement can be written as

$username = isset($_GET[‘user’]). $_GET[‘user’] : ‘nobody’;

Error handling is the most important phase during coding. PHP 7 provides you with the most extraordinary practices for exception handling. The exception may be caught or uncaught and your error is your uncached exception. The latest version of PHP gives you unbelievable support for Uncaught Exception.

The traditional method for reporting errors has been changed now. The practices in PHP 7 find your new way to throw the exception by implementing ‘Throwable’ (not in PHP 5. x, it is only valid in the latest version – PHP 7) to that relevant ‘Error’ class. This concept is put forward to get rid of traditional and engine exceptions in PHP 5 or previous versions.

The new Engine Exceptions are introduced to replace the relevant type of errors with the exceptions. Like, for PHP 5. x or PHP 7 when you want to catch both exceptions and errors. You have to add a catch block, to change after catching Throwable first.  

Being a member of the LAMP stack, the default PHP is Linux based. The later versions support it only with Linux. If you are working in a Windows environment then many x64-bit variables are not accessible in PHP 5. x or previous versions. You can’t access all the fruits of PHP while working in a Windows environment.

PHP 7 has revolutionized this critical downside of it. Now, the advent of PHP 7 has cracked the consistent 64-bit support which ensures both native x86 or x64-bit integers or large file support.

We, at Vizteck, are working on PHP for over a decade. Our developers are passionate about learning updated coding practices with time. We nurture startup ideas. If you want to build your project that is built on top of best coding practices, then contact our team.