Modern PHP for enterprise development

Modern features of the core PHP language

So, as clarified above, “PHP gets several things very deeply, and uniquely, right”. It has a huge community, vast libraries of code, and yeah, it powers above 79% of the entire Internet. It only made sense to improve it and modernize it.  And that’s exactly what happened.

Below are just some of the most notable “new PHP” features.

• Namespaces are an important concept that organizes PHP code into a hierarchy where. In addition to organizing a single application structure, namespaces allow each PHP component and/or framework to organize its code beneath its own globally unique vendor namespace so that it does not conflict with, or lay claim to, common class names used by other vendors.

  Namespaces are important because they let us create sandboxed code that works alongside other developers’ code. This is the cornerstone concept of the modern PHP component ecosystem.  

• Coding to an interface profoundly improves the ability to integrate third-party PHP components. In essence, an interface is a contract between two PHP objects that lets one object depend not on what another object is but, instead, on what another object can do. An interface decouples code from its dependencies, and it allows our code to depend on any third-party code that implements the expected interface.    
• Traits enable modular implementations that can be injected into otherwise unrelated classes and encourage code reuse.

  A trait is a partial class that can be mixed into existing PHP classes. Traits work double duty: they state what a class can do (like an interface), and they provide a modular implementation (like a class). 

• Generators don’t require the implementation of Iterator interface in a heavyweight class. Instead, generators compute and yield iteration values on-demand which has profound implications for application performance.  

• Closures are functions that encapsulate their surrounding state at the time they were created. The encapsulated state exists inside the closure even when the closure lives after its original environment ceases to exist.  

• Zend OPcache speeds up PHP execution by opcode caching and optimization. It stores precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. As of version 7.0 it can store precompiled script bytecode on disk. This eliminates the stages of reading code from the disk and compiling it on future access. For further performance improvements, the stored bytecode is optimized for faster execution.  

• Performance  – with the release of new PHP versions came huge performance gains! PHP 7 and 8 allow the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5.6, at almost half of the latency. This is a huge deal.   
• Security – Latest PHP versions offer better security improvements compared to PHP 5, including a filtered un-serialized function and a set of functions to easily get cryptographically secure random numbers.   
• JIT (Just-In-Time compilation) – PHP 8 introduced two JIT compilation engines. Tracing JIT, the most promising of the two, shows about 3 times better performance on synthetic benchmarks and 1.5–2 times improvement on some specific long-running applications.

  Relative JIT contribution to PHP 8 performance: 

   

• Type system and error handling improvements
  including stricter type checks for arithmetic/bitwise operators. 
• Scalar type declarations and return type declarations. These features make the maintenance of large pieces of code significantly easier. 
• Engine exceptions – with the addition of engine exceptions, fatal errors that would have resulted in script termination can be caught and handled easily. 
• Improved argument type declarations, or type hints, allow specifying the type of a variable that is expected to be passed to a function or a class method. Type hints are a feature available since PHP 5, and since PHP 7.2 we can use them with the object data type. Now PHP 7.4 brings type hinting a step forward by adding support for first-class property type declarations.

PHP Larevel is an extremely elegant framework

Laravel is a web application framework with an expressive, elegant syntax. A web framework that provides a structure for creating complex applications. Some notable Laravel features include:

• Elegant syntax – Laravel features expressive, elegant syntax — freeing you to create without sweating the small things.
• Progressive framework – Laravel grows with you. If you’re just taking your first steps into web development Laravel will make it easy. If you’re a senior developer, Laravel gives you robust tools for dependency injection, unit testing, queues, real-time events, and more. Laravel is fine-tuned for building enterprise web applications and ready to handle enterprise workloads.
• Scalable – Laravel is incredibly scalable. Thanks to Laravel’s built-in support for fast, distributed cache systems like Redis, horizontal scaling with Laravel is a breeze. In fact, Laravel applications have been easily scaled to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.
• MVC pattern – Laravel is largely based on MVC (Model View Controller) architecture.
• Eloquent ORM – Laravel includes Eloquent, an object-relational mapper (ORM) that makes it enjoyable to interact with your database. When using Eloquent, each database table has a corresponding “Model” that is used to interact with that table. In addition to retrieving records from the database table, Eloquent models allow you to insert, update, and delete records from the table as well.

A sample taste of Laravel: