You're reading from PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices A practical guide to PHP 8 features, usage changes, and advanced programming techniques

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801071871

Length 528 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

PHP

Tools

phpList

Concepts

Programming Language

Author (1):

Doug Bierer

View More author details

Table of Contents (17) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: PHP 8 Tips

2. Chapter 1: Introducing New PHP 8 OOP Features FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Learning about PHP 8's Functional Additions

4. Chapter 3: Taking Advantage of Error-Handling Enhancements

5. Chapter 4: Making Direct C-Language Calls

6. Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks

7. Chapter 5: Discovering Potential OOP Backward-Compatibility Breaks

8. Chapter 6: Understanding PHP 8 Functional Differences

9. Chapter 7: Avoiding Traps When Using PHP 8 Extensions

10. Chapter 8: Learning about PHP 8's Deprecated or Removed Functionality

11. Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices

12. Chapter 9: Mastering PHP 8 Best Practices

13. Chapter 10: Improving Performance

14. Chapter 11: Migrating Existing PHP Apps to PHP 8

15. Chapter 12: Creating PHP 8 Applications Using Asynchronous Programming

16. Other Books You May Enjoy

Examining the FFI class

As you learned in this chapter, not every developer has a need to use the FFI extension. Having direct experience with the FFI extension deepens your understanding of the internals of the PHP language, and this deepened understanding can have a beneficial impact on your career as a PHP developer: it's quite possible that at some point in the future, you will be employed by a company that has developed a custom PHP extension. Knowing how to operate the FFI extension in this situation allows you to develop new features for a custom PHP extension, as well as helping you to troubleshoot extension problems.

The FFI class consists of 20 methods that fall into four broad categories, outlined as follows:

Creational: Methods in this category create instances of classes available from the FFI extension application programming interface (API).
Comparison: Comparison methods are designed to compare C data values.
Informational: This set of methods...