PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 Migration for Powerful Web Application Development

24 May 2017

PHP is a globally used open source server-side scripting language that is especially popular for fulfilling the powerful web development needs. Supported by a huge community, PHP platform offers the extraordinary features to meet the distinct needs of various clients. The latest version, PHP 7 comes with various incredible features and offers the fast and reliable performance for websites and online applications.

PHP 7 can drastically reduce the memory consumption and as well as host amazing benefits to make your apps popular and award winning. Additionally, this feature rich PHP version has made the migration process seamless as much as possible. This version is specially created for reducing the futile functionality of previous PHP versions and improving the language consistency.

Uniqueness of PHP 7

The PHP 7 provides a noticeable improvement in website performance. It is almost twice powerful in comparison to the PHP 5.6. It can easily compete with Facebook’s Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) as well as you don’t need to take more stress to execute the PHP source code.

On WordPress 4.1.1, PHP 7 can execute and run effectively and has the ability to response more than thousands of requests per second. And the latest release of PHP 7 blessed with extraordinary technical benefits. So, if you are looking forward to migrate into PHP 7 in order to meet your future business objectives, you should familiarize with the scalar type declarations.

Scalar type declarations

With the new PHP 7, developers have great options to use Scalar types: coercive or strict. Specifically: int, float, string and bool. By introducing the scalar hints PHP developers can develop more accurate codes. It also gives them more command as well as make the PHP codes easily readable for new developers too.

Migrating From PHP 5.6 to PHP 7:

1. First of all, make sure that all libraries that you are using presently in your existing PHP project are also available for PHP 7.

2. If your existing PHP project code is developed using the PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6, then upgrading to PHP 7 will most likely be straightforward.

3. When you upgrade your existing PHP code into PHP 7, it is quite important to assure that your code includes tests (unit and integration test). And, if there is any hidden complication or issue with your web application, then both these tests will be helpful to find and fix the bugs before they show up in a live environment.

4. Updating your code from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 requires extraordinary checking abilities to find out incompatibilities in your libraries and your code if any.

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