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Introduction to PHP7

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Introduction

2:37 with Alena Holligan

I'm very happy to introduce you to the first major release of PHP in over a decade. So what does this mean for you as a developer? Besides making your sites run faster, there are a number of new features in PHP7 and I'll be covering the top features here. We'll cover some of the gotchas associated with these features and we’ll also introduce you to a few more changes to watch out for.

Start Coding

Download the latest version of PHP7
MAMP, XAMPP, and WAMP all include PHP7. Take a look at these workshops for installing a local development environment.
MAC: Local Development Environment
Windows: Local Development Environment

Documentation

Migrating from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x

Benchmarks

http://zsuraski.blogspot.com/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.html http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    Hello, welcome to PHP 7. 0:04
    I'm Alena, and I'm very happy to introduce you to the first major release in PHP 0:07
    in over a decade. 0:12
    The PHP community is very excited to welcome this latest release. 0:13
    But that doesn't mean that PHP has been stagnant all this time. 0:17
    On the contrary, minor releases of PHP 5 brought many 0:20
    exciting features to PHP, including the support of object oriented programming and 0:25
    the many features associated with that. 0:30
    So first off, why seven and not six? 0:33
    Let's just say that Unicode didn't go so well. 0:36
    As with many projects, requirements were not well defined and 0:39
    people couldn't agree on things, so the project ground to a halt. 0:42
    But besides Unicode for encoding special and 0:46
    international characters, almost all the features being discussed for 0:48
    PHP6 Were eventually implemented in PHP 5.3 and later. 0:51
    So we really didn't miss anything else. 0:57
    Through it all, many things were learned, and 0:59
    a new process for feature requests was put in place. 1:02
    When the feature set for a major release was accepted, it was decided to 1:05
    avoid confusion with a dead project and to skip to version 7 for the latest release. 1:09
    So, what makes PHP 7 so special? 1:14
    In a single word, speed. 1:17
    The developers worked very hard to refactor the PHP code base in order to 1:20
    reduce memory consumption and increase performance, and they certainly succeeded. 1:24
    Bench marks for PHP 7 consistently show speeds twice as fast as PHP 5.6. 1:30
    And many times even faster. 1:35
    Although these results are not guaranteed for your project, 1:38
    the benchmarks were tested against major projects such as Drupal and WordPress. 1:41
    So these numbers don't come from abstract performance tests. 1:46
    With statistics showing that 25% of the web is being run on WordPress, 1:50
    this is a great thing for everyone. 1:54
    So what does this mean for you as a developer. 1:57
    Besides making your sites run faster, there are a number of new features in 1:59
    PHP 7 and I'll be covering these top features here. 2:03
    Type declarations, exceptions and error handling, spaceship and 2:07
    null coalesce operators, easy user land CSPRNG. 2:12
    We'll cover some of the gotchas associated with these features, and 2:17
    we'll also introduce you to a few more changes to watch out for. 2:20
    To help you get started right away, I've included links to many different resources 2:23
    as well as downloads of any of the code snippets used in these videos. 2:28
    So hold on to your hat and buckle up for this exciting time in PHP. 2:32

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