PHP 5 Features That Make Coding Easier
PHP is used to build web sites on tens of millions of servers across the globe. This version of the language contains a number of features that improve coding and make it more efficient.
XML support has been beefed up by adding a unified extension that is based on libxml2. It also fully complies with W3 specifications.
1. Object-Oriented Programming
PHP’s Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features make it easy to write modular, reusable code. These include classes, constructors, methods that start with two underscores (__construct), class type hints, interfaces, and static attributes and functions.
PHP also supports multiple inheritance through the use of interfaces. Inheritance is facilitated by the __extends__ function and allows you to create classes that implement an interface.
Another feature is the __destruct() method, which cleans up resources associated with an object when it’s destroyed. Another new feature is the final keyword, which prevents child or descendant classes from overriding a method. The use of the final keyword is optional, and it’s best used when a method’s behavior is unlikely to change over time. This prevents a child class from changing a previously defined function, and it ensures that other classes can use the same method.
2. XML
XML is a standard way to identify and describe information. It’s very similar to HTML, but has a lot of extra power. It’s also self-describing, meaning that every tag is accompanied by a description of the information it contains.
This is especially helpful if you’re sharing XML documents with other developers or need to guarantee that someone else will be able to read them. XML also supports a number of extensions, including XSLT and DTD-validation.
PHP’s XML support is much improved in version 5. All of the XML-supporting parts in PHP are now based on the GNOME project’s libxml2 library. This will help ensure that all XML-related extensions are standardized and work well together. It will also improve the performance of all XML-related functions. This is because all of the underlying memory management is done in a single place. This should also make it easier to update the XML support in future versions of PHP without affecting older applications.
3. Web Services
PHP supports a wide variety of libraries and extensions that make it easier to develop complex web applications. It also has a large number of tools that help to debug PHP code, and it can handle high traffic websites. However, older versions of PHP have security vulnerabilities and may be slower than other scripting languages.
PHP 5 provides support for the popular web services frameworks SOAP and WSDL. These frameworks allow java,.net, and PHP apps to communicate over a network using open standards such as HTML, XML, SOAP, and UDDI.
PHP 5 also allows a developer to use the same name for classes, interfaces, and traits as well as to import static methods. It also features scalar type hints that can help determine whether a function parameter should be an integer, float, string or boolean. This allows developers to write cleaner, more maintainable code. The PHP language also supports a range of other object-oriented programming features such as access modifiers, abstract classes and polymorphism.
4. Iterator
A foreach loop in PHP is a powerful way to iterate through a collection of data. PHP has some built-in iterator classes for common use cases like looping through arrays and database result sets.
A core component of the Zend Engine, PHP’s core engine that parses and executes code, has undergone a number of changes in PHP 5. This includes performance tweaks for mulit-threaded environments as well as an overhaul in how objects are passed around.
Objects are now passed by reference rather than by value, and the way in which they are manipulated is much more flexible. In addition, the Iterator class has been rewritten to improve its functionality. The Iterator interface now has a method called rewind() that allows the iterator to back up to its starting point. The next(), valid() and current() methods return an inner iterator that can be fetched by calling getInnerIterator(). The iterator_to_array() and iterator_count() functions allow you to get an accurate count of the number of elements in your iterator.
