CHAPTER 1 – What Is New in PHP 5?

What Is New in PHP 5? "The best way to be ready for the future is to invent it."-- John Sculley 1.1 INTRODUCTION Only time will tell if the PHP 5 release will be as successful as its two prede- cessors (PHP 3 and PHP 4). The new features and changes aim to rid PHP of any weaknesses it may have had and make sure that it stays in the lead as the world's best web-scripting language. This book details PHP 5 and its new features. However, if you are familiar with PHP 4 and are eager to know what is new in PHP 5, this chapter is for you. When you finish reading this chapter, you will have learned The new language features News concerning PHP extensions Other noteworthy changes to PHP's latest version

1.2 LANGUAGE FEATURES 1.2.1 New Object-Oriented Model When Zeev Suraski added the object-oriented syntax back in the days of PHP 3, it was added as "syntactic sugar for accessing collections." The OO model also had support for inheritance and allowed a class (and object) to aggregate both methods and properties, but not much more. When Zeev and Andi Gut- mans rewrote the scripting engine for PHP 4, it was a completely new engine; it ran much faster, was more stable, and boasted more features. However, the OO model first introduced in PHP 3 was barely touched. Although the object model had serious limitations, it was used exten- sively around the world, often in large PHP applications. This impressive use of the OOP paradigm with PHP 4, despite its weaknesses, led to it being the main focus for the PHP 5 release.

So, what were some of the limitations in PHP 3 and 4? The biggest limi- tation (which led to further limitations) was the fact that the copy semantics of objects were the same as for native types. So, how did this actually affect the PHP developer? When assigning a variable (that points to an object) to another variable, a copy of the object would be created. Not only did this impact performance, but it also usually led to obscure behavior and bugs in PHP 4 applications because many developers thought that both variables would point at the same object, which was not the case. The variables were instead pointing at separate copies of the same object. Changing one would not change the other. For example: class Person { var $name; function getName() { return $this->name; } function setName($name) { $this->name = $name; } function Person($name) { $this->setName($name); } } function changeName($person, $name) { $person->setName($name); } $person = new Person("Andi"); changeName($person, "Stig"); print $person->getName();

In PHP 4, this code would print out "Andi". The reason is that we pass the object $person to the changeName() function by-value, and thus, $person is copied and changeName() works on a copy of $person. This behavior is not intuitive, as many developers would expect the Java- like behavior. In Java, variables actually hold a handle (or pointer) to the object, and therefore, when it is copied, only the handle (and not the entire object) is duplicated. There were two kinds of users in PHP 4: the ones who were aware of this problem and the ones who were not. The latter would usually not notice this problem and their code was written in a way where it did not really matter if the problem existed. Surely some of these people had sleepless nights trying to track down weird bugs that they could not pinpoint. The former group dealt with this problem by always passing and assigning objects by reference. This would prevent the engine from copying their objects, but it would be a head- ache because the code included numerous & signs.

1.2 Language Features The old object model not only led to the afore-mentioned problems, but also to fundamental problems that prevented implementing some additional features on top of the existing object model. In PHP 5, the infrastructure of the object model was rewritten to work with object handles. Unless you explicitly clone an object by using the clone keyword, you never create behind-the-scenes duplicates of your objects. In PHP 5, you don't need a need to pass objects by reference or assign them by reference. Note: Passing by reference and assigning by reference are still sup- ported, in case you want to actually change a variable's content (whether object or other type). 1.2.2 New Object-Oriented Features The new OO features are too numerous to give a detailed description in this section. Chapter 3, "PHP 5 OO Language," details each feature. The following list provides the main new features: public/private/protected access modifiers for methods and properties. Allows the use of common OO access modifiers to control access to methods and properties: class MyClass { private $id = 18; public function getId() { return $this->id; } } Unified constructor name __construct(). Instead of the constructor being the name of the class, it is now declared as __construct(), which makes it easier to shift classes inside class hier- archies: class MyClass { function __construct() { print "Inside constructor"; } } Object destructor support by defining a __destructor() method. Allows defining a destructor function that runs when an object is destroyed: class MyClass { function __destruct() { print "Destroying object"; } }

Interfaces. Gives the ability for a class to fulfill more than one is-a relationships. A class can inherit only from one class, but may implement as many interfaces as it wants: interface Display { function display(); } class Circle implements Display { function display() { print "Displaying circlen"; } } instanceof operator. Language-level support for is-a relationship checking. The PHP 4 is_a() function is now deprecated: if ($obj instanceof Circle) { print '$obj is a Circle'; } Final methods. The final keyword allows you to mark methods so that an inheriting class cannot overload them: class MyClass { final function getBaseClassName() { return __CLASS__; } } Final classes. After declaring a class as final, it cannot be inherited. The following example would error out. final class FinalClass { } class BogusClass extends FinalClass { } Explicit object cloning. To clone an object, you must use the clone keyword. You may declare a __clone() method, which will be called during the clone process (after the properties have been copied from the original object):

1.2 Language Features class MyClass { function __clone() { print "Object is being cloned"; } } $obj = new MyClass(); $obj_copy = clone $obj; Class constants. Class definitions can now include constant values and are referenced using the class: class MyClass { const SUCCESS = "Success"; const FAILURE = "Failure"; } print MyClass::SUCCESS; Static methods. You can now define methods as static by allowing them to be called from non-object context. Static methods do not define the $this variable because they are not bound to any specific object: class MyClass { static function helloWorld() { print "Hello, world"; } } MyClass::helloWorld(); Static members. Class definitions can now include static members (properties) that are accessible via the class. Common usage of static members is in the Singleton pattern: class Singleton { static private $instance = NULL; private function __construct() { } static public function getInstance() { if (self::$instance == NULL) { self::$instance = new Singleton(); } return self::$instance; } }