9 Things You Should Need to Know About PHP 7

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If you are a web developer or a website owner,
and you love to use CMS that are PHP-enabled like
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Magento, you should
rejoice to hear that according to official PHP
timetable, PHP 7 which was released on 3 December
2015, is now ready for the production use. Yes
you heard it right! PHP 7 is out to use. We
are going to tell all the great things you need
to know about PHP 7.
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• As soon as the PHP 7 was released, many
  developers and programmers started downloading
  the beta version and start playing around it but
  found it full of bugs.
• They reported it and that is how the PHP 7 went
  behind the curtains until it become fully
  bug-proof.
• PHP 7 is a platform that can deliver powerful
  app, all from cloud to enterprise applications
  and from mobile to the web Applications. Almost
  everything comes under the umbrella of PHP 7.
  This version has the most powerful impact as it
  decreases the memory consumption with extreme
  improvements in performance.

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Lets take a look at what PHP 7 entails!
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1. Dont Get Confuse in 6 or 7

• The version PHP 5.6 renamed to PHP 7. As PHP 6
  already existed, developers tend to do some
  experimental project but this version of PHP
  never reached to the production phase. After some
  dispute, the PHP official development team came
  to a conclusion and they decided that they will
  name this new version to PHP 7 and will omit PHP
  6 name completely.
• The decision helped the users to stay away from
  mixing up the previously attempted experiment
  with the latest development. 

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2.  PHPNG, the New Core

• After the release of PHP 4 in 1999, the platform
  was powered by the Zend engine till now.
• Zend, the Zend Framework, which supports PHP 7,
  is an open source execution engine and is written
  in C language. It is used to interpret the PHP
  language. The PHP 5.X uses the Zend Engine II
  that was used to enhance the functionality of the
  previous engine.
• Whereas the PHP 7 uses the Zend Engine with a
  code name of PHPNG (Next Generation).

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3. Double the Speed

• There are many improvements which can be seen
  when it comes to new PHPNG Engine, but the most
  significant feature is the improvement in the
  performance. The PHPNG is the new structure of
  the Zend Engine thus, we can see optimized memory
  usage.
• By using PHP7, you will need fewer servers to
  serve the same amount of users with the increased
  time of execution of code. The below graph is the
  performance benchmarks that Zend Performance Team
  provides.

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4. Power of Error Handling

• Handling the catchable fatal errors is not an
  easy task for PHP coders and never have been. The
  only solution to handle these fatal errors is to
  use Exceptions.This new Zend Engine provides the
  facility for the PHP developers to handle the
  errors easily without the system failure at the
  run time which is quite unprofessional.
• The new EngineException objects in new Zend
  Engine dont extend the Exception Base Class of
  previous versions. This object shows that the new
  system is using the interfaces and data from
  earlier versions but producing the different
  kinds of exceptions in error handling the
  Traditional and the Engine Exceptions.
• PHP 7 enables PHP programmers to catch both types
  of exceptions by introducing the new Parent Class
  Called BaseException.

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• The code and the result emerged because of the
  fatal errors due to the previous versions is
  shown below

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The new changings are
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5. 64-Bit Windows Systems Support

• Native environment of PHP is Linux because the
  PHP is a prominent member of the LAMP stack. But
  it is not impossible to run PHP to run on Windows
  system. There are two types of bit systems of
  Windows X86 and X64. The PHP 5.X dont provide
  the support to X64 bit version of Windows. So PHP
  7 introduced the support to X64 bit Windows
  system.
• PHP 7 now allows you to run the language on your
  64-bit Windows system. Both 64-bit integers and
  large files are supported by PHP 7.

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6. New Spaceship (ltgt) and Null Coalescing (??)
 Operators

• The official name for Spaceship operator
  is Combined Comparison Operator. The notation of
  this operator is like a simplified spaceship like
  this ltgt.
• This operator gives result 0 if both left-hand
  operand and right-hand operand are equal, returns
  1 if the left operand is greater than right
  operand and -1 if the left operand is greater
  than the right operand. This three-way comparison
  operator not only exist in PHP but also in other
  programming languages like Perl and Ruby.

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• The Null Coalescing denoted as (??), used to
  check if the value exists or not, if the value
  does not exist then it returns a default value
  and if the value does exist it will return the
  left operand, and right operand returned if the
  value doesnt exist or may be any other case.
• The below code snippet shows how this new
  operator reduces the time spent on basic
  declarations

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7.  Enables Accurate Type Declarations

• The new PHP 7 allows developers and programmers
  that they can intensify the quality of their code
  by using the correct return type declarations so
  that the unintended return values can prevented.

• The image shows a simple use case foo() function.
  This feature is supposed to return an array.
  There are more complicated examples which show
  the return type declarations.
• PHP 7 have introduced four new types of
  declarations for scalar values to increase the
  features even more. The types are int, float,
  string and bool. These new scalar types allow the
  PHP developers to denote the integers, floats,
  strings or booleans to get returned.

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8. Add Anonymous Classes

• PHP 7 enables the developers to use OOP concept
  and to use anonymous classes. The concept already
  exists and used in many Object-oriented languages
  like C and Java. The anonymous class as
  defined by the name- are the classes with no
  names. But the object that instantiates has same
  functionality as an object of a named class.
• If we talk about the syntax which is same as what
  we were using in traditional PHP classes the only
  difference is the name, which is missing. The
  advantage of using anonymous class is that it can
  increase the speed of code and execution time as
  well, if and only if these classes used in an
  excellent way. And in the case when a class
  doesnt need to be documented.

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9. Imports from the Same Namespace

• The Group Use Declarations is indeed a bless
  feature for the developers who want to import
  many classes from the same namespace when
  required. This new syntax helped the developers
  by cutting the babbling of words, makes the code
  neat and clean and easier and save the typing
  time.
• Using Group Use Declarations makes it easy and
  clean for you to read through and debug codes as
  it helps the developers to identify the imports
  of the same namespace in a module.

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Conclusion

• PHP 7 has been introduced with a goal to free up
  space which leads to improvement. It was crucial
  to get rid of many deprecated functionalities,
  old and unsupported Server APIs and extensions to
  increase the speed and free up space.
• This clean up provides more security by removing
  items that have deprecated for a while in PHP 5
  and not in use for a long time. PHP 7 can break
  the code if your app is running on older version
  of PHP.
• This article helps you to get to the conclusion
  that how advance the PHP 7 is. And in next
  versions, you will see more enhancements and new
  improvements which would be more exciting for the
  developers and programmers who love to play with
  PHP code. You might then come across some bugs
  but wait! Thats how the system tested and thats
  how you will learn more and more and can become
  PHP champ!

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THE END