October 2015
Intermediate to advanced
25 pages
1h 4m
English
Content preview from Upgrading to PHP 7
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Chapter 1. Upgrading to PHP 7
PHP 7 is here, and it’s the most dramatic update to PHP in over a decade. A revamped engine (Zend Engine 3), numerous new features, and lots of language cleanup mean lots of exciting changes to the language that runs the Web.
Bringing with it huge speed improvements and minimal backward incompatibility, there are major benefits to upgrading today.
PHP 7 Timeline
With PHP 7.0 now released, we will see the end of life for PHP 5.5 on July 10, 2016, and PHP 5.6 will move to security-only fixes just a few months later on August 28, 2016—with its end of life scheduled to take place a year later.
What this also means, implicitly, is that any PHP version prior to 5.5 has already reached its end of life and is no longer receiving security fixes.
Given the backward incompatibility issues with moving to PHP 7, you might think that upgrading will be a painful and long process; however, the PHP team has done a fantastic job at minimizing backward incompatibility. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the upgrade to PHP 7.0 is easier than upgrading from 5.2 to 5.3.
How We Got Here
Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that we skipped straight from PHP 5 to PHP 7, and if you’re curious like me, you might be wondering just why that would be the case. While you might be tempted to think we’re following in the footsteps of Microsoft® Windows (which skipped version 9 and jumped from 8.1 to 10), in actual fact, it was a subject of much debate filled with intrigue, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.