What's New in PHP 5.4
Hello! Judging by the rumors, on January 19, the next RC PHP 5.4 was supposed to be released. It is even possible that it will be final. And this means that you need to quickly engage in the study of new opportunities.
For several years I have been professionally engaged in web development and use PHP as the main server language. So after learning about the release of such a major update, I went to collect information. Under a cat shortlist of the most significant innovations.
The key novelty of 5.4 is impurities. They will serve as a replacement for multi-inheritance in PHP. Each admixture is defined by a separate “class” via the trait keyword. Inside the impurity, methods can be defined that will be available in the class to which the impurities will be connected. Impurities are connected using the use language construct. The names of the impurities are given separated by commas and all their methods become available inside the class.
If the names of the class methods and impurities coincide, then the class method will become the priority method. Unfortunately, in this case we will not even get Notice.
An impurity always has access to the class to which it is connected, through the parent construct.
Yes Yes. You no longer have to use extensions like multibyte and the like. All string functions understand Unicode very well.
This feature is the cornerstone for many PHP developers. How often do we need to pull the zero index of a method that returns an array? How much infuriates that this seemingly simple operation has to be written in two lines, and even create a variable? Now you don’t have to suffer anymore:
In PHP 5.4, a short array entry is now available, without the keyword array.
From now on, a built-in web server designed exclusively for development will be delivered with the PHP distribution. It can be launched from the console and hung on some port:
Despite the fact that the HTML 5 File API implements a mechanism for tracking the process of downloading a file to the server (the size of the downloaded part is given by the browser itself), in PHP 5.4 an additional source of monitoring the download status will appear. It will be stored in the user's session in the key, for example, upload_progress_myform and we can pull it with Ajax at any time tocapture the world of rendering the progress bar.
Another nice innovation that will help us save a line of code. In order to call a property or method of a class, you will no longer need to remember it in a separate variable.
PHP clearly goes towards strong typing. Previously, for automatic type checking, only arrays and class names could be specified in the method arguments. Now this possibility extends to some other types: int, float and boolean.
The @ operator is used in PHP to disable error output on the current line of code. Earlier in highly loaded applications it was impossible to use @ because of rather noticeable brakes. Therefore, I personally do not use it anywhere else.
In the end, muffling mistakes is strange. Errors need to be corrected or caught Exceptions.
In addition, register_globals, long_arrays and other directives that were waiting for deletion were finally cut out from PHP.
Update: Fixed trail on trait, I apologize, thanks DoctorChaos for the tip.
Update 2: Scalar type hints in PHP 5.4 will not. Despite this statement, there is no scalar type hints in the SVN tag 5.4 :( Thanks to Irker and sectus .
For several years I have been professionally engaged in web development and use PHP as the main server language. So after learning about the release of such a major update, I went to collect information. Under a cat shortlist of the most significant innovations.
Impurities
The key novelty of 5.4 is impurities. They will serve as a replacement for multi-inheritance in PHP. Each admixture is defined by a separate “class” via the trait keyword. Inside the impurity, methods can be defined that will be available in the class to which the impurities will be connected. Impurities are connected using the use language construct. The names of the impurities are given separated by commas and all their methods become available inside the class.
If the names of the class methods and impurities coincide, then the class method will become the priority method. Unfortunately, in this case we will not even get Notice.
An impurity always has access to the class to which it is connected, through the parent construct.
class A {
public function foo() {
return 'foo';
}
}
trait B {
public function bar() {
return parent::foo() . ' bar';
}
}
class C extends A {
use B;
}
$c = new C();
echo $c->foo(); // foo
echo $c->bar(); // foo bar
Unicode native support
Yes Yes. You no longer have to use extensions like multibyte and the like. All string functions understand Unicode very well.
Array dereferencing support
This feature is the cornerstone for many PHP developers. How often do we need to pull the zero index of a method that returns an array? How much infuriates that this seemingly simple operation has to be written in two lines, and even create a variable? Now you don’t have to suffer anymore:
function foo() {
return array(1, 2, 3);
}
echo foo()[0]; // 1
Short syntax for arrays
In PHP 5.4, a short array entry is now available, without the keyword array.
// Раньше приходилось писать так:
$array = array(1, 2, 3);
// Теперь можно так:
$array = [1, 2, 3];
// И даже так:
$array = ['first' => 1, 'second' => 2];
Embedded web server
From now on, a built-in web server designed exclusively for development will be delivered with the PHP distribution. It can be launched from the console and hung on some port:
php -S localhost:8000Upload progress
Despite the fact that the HTML 5 File API implements a mechanism for tracking the process of downloading a file to the server (the size of the downloaded part is given by the browser itself), in PHP 5.4 an additional source of monitoring the download status will appear. It will be stored in the user's session in the key, for example, upload_progress_myform and we can pull it with Ajax at any time to
Calling a method or class property with an expression
Another nice innovation that will help us save a line of code. In order to call a property or method of a class, you will no longer need to remember it in a separate variable.
class A {
public static function foo_bar() {
return '123';
}
}
$foo = 'foo';
$bar = 'bar';
echo A::{$foo . '_' . $bar}(); // 123
Scalar type hints
PHP clearly goes towards strong typing. Previously, for automatic type checking, only arrays and class names could be specified in the method arguments. Now this possibility extends to some other types: int, float and boolean.
function foo(int $a, bool $b) {
return true;
}
Improved performance @
The @ operator is used in PHP to disable error output on the current line of code. Earlier in highly loaded applications it was impossible to use @ because of rather noticeable brakes. Therefore, I personally do not use it anywhere else.
In the end, muffling mistakes is strange. Errors need to be corrected or caught Exceptions.
Deleted
In addition, register_globals, long_arrays and other directives that were waiting for deletion were finally cut out from PHP.
References
Update: Fixed trail on trait, I apologize, thanks DoctorChaos for the tip.
Update 2: Scalar type hints in PHP 5.4 will not. Despite this statement, there is no scalar type hints in the SVN tag 5.4 :( Thanks to Irker and sectus .