Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

The autoload and autoload-dev

This autoload option is there to autoload either a namespace or group of classes under one directory or simply a class. It is a PHP autoloader alternative that Composer provides. This is what tells Composer which directory to look into while auto-loading a class.

The auto-load property has two more properties, that is classmap and psr-4. PSR4 is a standard that describes specifications for auto-loading classes from file paths. You can read more about it at http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-4/.

Here, PSR-4 is specifying a namespace and from where this namespace should be loaded. Here, in preceding the example, the App namespace should be getting content from the app directory.

Another property is classmap. This is ...