PHP 7 explained
PHP 7 is a significant release of PHP programming language. It is promoted as a revolution. As for how web applications are possible to be developed and produced for the cloud and mobile to enterprises. This particular release is pointed to be the most significant improvement for PHP after the announcement of PHP 5 in 2004.
Initiation of the development of PHP 7
The initiative for the development of PHP 7 came from Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. These three developers designed a test branch of PHP that they first named PHP Next Generation (PHPNG). The PHP community embraced it, as it had crucial performance improvements. It continued to develop into a well-built version now known as PHP 7. After some months of beta testing, the official release was in December 2015.
What Drove the Need for PHP 7?
The PHP language is extremely popular. Rasmus Lerdorf created it in 1994. Since then, it has gained popularity, and now approximately 82 percent of websites implement PHP. That indicates that most of the Web is relying on this language. In addition, the amount of people online is continuing to increase. This includes the rapidly growing number of mobile users. Therefore, the servers that power the world’s websites are necessary to be able to respond fast to user requests. Speed is an essential factor in the design of a website. People are going to leave a web page that takes a lot of time to load.
The PHP changes boosted the performance of sites dramatically. It is estimated that version 7 gives a 100 percent increase in performance speed compared to version 5.6. This allows the developers to make websites that present attractive and interesting interactive traits that can also respond to visitors’ input fast.
The development of this version was also motivated by the need for scripting languages that work more efficiently. The desire for that is inspired by two things: the need to decrease power consumption to protect the ecosystem and the need to reduce expenses.
It reduces the demands on the servers, which makes it more friendly for the environment and more cost-effective decision. In addition, compared to PHP 5.6, running PHP 7 applications needs less energy to power servers.
New Features
To PHP 7 are added a lot of new features. The most significant ones from them are the following:
- Improved performance − It is twice faster than PHP 5 when you have a PHPNG code united in PHP 7.
- Scalar type declarations − Now, return types and parameters are able to be implemented.
- Less Memory Usage − The optimized PHP 7 consumes a lot lesser resources.
- Exception hierarchy − The feature is improved.
- 64-bit support − 64-bit architecture machines receive constant support.
- Several fatal errors converted to Exceptions − The variety of exceptions is extended. Including many fatal errors turned into exceptions.
- Null coalescing operator (??) − A new feature is applied to replace the ternary operation in conjunction with the isset() function.
- Secure random number generator − Increase of the latest secure random number generator API.
- Return and Scalar Type Declarations − Added support for the return type and parameter type.
- Deprecated SAPIs and extensions removed − Several past and unsupported SAPIs and extensions are eliminated from the PHP 7 version.
- Anonymous Classes − It is added support for anonymous.
- Zero cost asserts − Also added support for zero cost asserts.
PHP 7 applies new Zend Engine 3.0. The purpose is for the performance of the application to improve twice. Also, the consumption of memory to be 50% better than PHP 5.6. This allows without any extra hardware to work for more concurrent users.
PHP 7 is created contemplating today’s workloads.