Looking Forward to PHP 7

Release Coming Soon

We have recently started to evaluate our website using the beta1 version of PHP 7 which is based on PHPNG (PHP Next Generation) and offers improvements in speed and some new features and operators.

PHP 7

Our website has performed well during tests and the speed improvement is noticeable in its effect. There have been no problems found so far so we hope to be able to migrate over once it has been released as stable.

You can find a copy of the migration documentation over on the PHP website explaining how to migrate and any problems that maybe be encountered such as deprecated or removed functions.

PHP 7 supports return type declaration which you can use to specify the type returned by a function similar to parameter types added in PHP 5. The null coalesce operator looks to make life that little bit easier than using the ternary operator.

$var = $_GET['var'] ?? 'default value';

is the same as

$var = isset($_GET['var']) ? $_GET['var'] : 'default value';

Constants can now be arrays which is handy and there is a list on new functions added to the language here.

We plan on using these new features as we go with new releases along side running the beta version of PHP 7 on the alpha server used for local development our test environment will continue to use PHP 5 along with production until it is deemed stable.

It will be good to gain an impressive speed up with a minimal amount of work on our behalf!!