Special Features of PHP 7 that makes it Awesome

The whole community of PHP and people associated with PHP web development are all excited with the biggest release PHP version. PHP 7 definitely adds extra versatility to the present language.

Here are some features of PHP7 that make it special:

1. Speed Improvement: With the aim to boost performance & reduce memory, professional PHP developers worked very hard to change the PHP development. And finally, they got to succeed.

   PHP 7 is standards for constantly showing speeds two times as fast as PHP 5.6 and most of the times even quicker. Since their results are not assured for the project, benchmarks got tested for the major projects, Drupal and WordPress, so these numbers don’t arise by abstract performance in PHP web development. But relying on the statistics, 25 percent of the web being operated on WordPress, this is an amazing thing for everybody.

2. Error Handling: Handling serious errors in the history has been something impossible in PHP development. A serious error wouldn’t invoke the error handler & would just stop your script. At the production server, this generally means showing a blank white screen that confuses the user as well as causes your integrity to drop. This can also cause problems with resources that were not at all closed appropriately and are still under the use or even locked.

   In the latest PHP 7, an exception will be raised when a recoverable and fatal error occurs, instead of just stopping the script. Serious errors still exist for some conditions, like running out of memory, & still behave like before by instantly stopping the script. The uncaught exception will moreover continue to be a critical error in PHP 7 programming. This implies that if an exception thrown by an error which was fatal in PHP 5 gets uncaught, it will still be a critical error in PHP 7.

3. Type Declarations: This simply means specifying the type of variable which is being set in place of allowing PHP to set this robotically. PHP is termed as a weakly typed language. Basically, it means that PHP development doesn’t want you to declare the data types. The variables are still having data types allied with them but you can do fundamental things such as adding a string to an integer devoid of getting an error. Type declarations assist you to define what ought to occur so that you attain the most expected results. Moreover, this can make your code much easy to read.

   Since the PHP 5 version, you can utilize type hinting to indicate the desired data type of an argument inside the function declaration, and only inside the declaration. Whenever you call any function, PHP development will confirm whether or not particular arguments are of the specific type. If not, a run-time error will be raised and execution process will be halted. Apart from only being utilized in the function declarations, with PHP 7 we now have extra Scalar types. Specifically: int, string, float, and bool.

4. New Operators: Below are two operators introduced by the PHP 7
   • Spaceship Operator: PHP 7 has brought us, various new operators. The foremost one we are going to discuss is the spaceship operator. The spaceship operator also called as Combined Comparison Operator is a good addition to the PHP language that complements the less-than and greater-than operators. The most frequent use for such kind of operator is in sorting.

     Spaceship Operator: < = >

   • Null Coalesce Operator: The next new operator in PHP7, the Null Coalesce Operator, is efficiently the enchanted if-set-or. This will return the left operand in the case when it is not NULL, or else it will return the right. The significant thing is that this will not show a notice in case the left operand is a variable that is non-existent.

There are quite a lot of other features introduced in PHP 7, like international characters and Unicode support for emoji. One more big area which could cause a problem, are features which have been taken out. This should actually is the issue if you are working through an elder code base, as the features that have been taken out are mostly ones that have been denigrated for a long time. In case you have been putting off making such required changes, the massive benefit in speed with PHP 7 must help convince you, or management, to take the time required to revise your code. You should hire best PHP web development Company for your latest development project.