Learn what's new in PHP 7

Scalar is a popular language that has some type declarations for arguments; now this is available in PHP. This will make your functions more structured and coerce the parameter data types to be what you want.

This lecture will cover type coercion of object data passed to our functions arguments.

PHP 7 supports data type declarations for values returned from a function. Similar to argument type declarations, return type declarations specify the type of the value that will be returned from a function.

Some lovely sugar syntax for PHP developers. Instead of if statements and writing unnecessary code but rather in one line we can optionally define the value of variable.

The spaceship operator is good for doing a comparison of two numbers and returns differing values depending on the comparison.

Array constants can now be defined with define(). In PHP 5.6, they could only be defined with const.

Support for anonymous classes has been added via new class. These can be used in place of full class definitions for throwaway or framework objects.

PHP7 now lets you use unicode characters escaped by UTF-8 in the hexadecimal format.

Your function's can be invoked with a predefined value for the this context; set by the call method. This is very similar to JavaScripts call method and works in the same way.

This feature seeks to provide better security when unserializing objects on untrusted data. It prevents possible code injections by enabling the developer to whitelist classes that can be unserialized.

Classes, functions and constants being imported from the same namespace can now be grouped together in a single use statement.

The new intdiv() function performs an integer division of its operands and returns it.

The session start function now accepts an array of options that override the session configuration directives normally set in php ini file.

The new preg_replace_callback_array() function enables code to be written more cleanly when using thepreg_replace_callback() function. Prior to PHP 7, callbacks that needed to be executed per regular expression required the callback function to be polluted with lots of branching.

Generator functions are a new way of programming. They allow us to control the execution of a function and even change the state of the function in mid execution.

We've discovered generator functions allow you to pause and give way to other processing providing flexibility in programming. Lets delve into the syntax of generators and see how PHP works with them.

Generators allow for yielding values so that you can evaluate and use that value outside of the generator function.

Next we want to take a look at all the different primitive types like string, integer, float or bool and objects such as a class object, array or associative array.

Generators where introduced in PHP5.5 but in PHP7 and above there are new features we can work with. Such as return statements and yielding from other yield functions.

[DEPRICTAED] Style constructors

PHP 4 style constructors (methods that have the same name as the class they are defined in) are deprecated. PHP 7 will return an E_DEPRECATED please only use the __construct() method.

[DEPRICATED] Static calls to non-static methods

Static calls to methods that are not declared static are deprecated, and may be removed in the future.

[DEPRICATED] Password hash

The salt option for the password_hash() function has been deprecated to prevent developers from generating their own (usually insecure) salts. The function itself generates a cryptographically secure salt when no salt is provided by the developer - therefore custom salt generation should not be needed.

[DEPRICATED] Capture session meta data

The capture_session_meta SSL context option has been deprecated. SSL metadata is now available through thestream_get_meta_data() function.

Thank you for taking this course and I hope to see you using PHP 7 at its best in the future.

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