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PHP for people who know how to program

So, you've chosen / been forced to learn PHP! Congratulations, it's actually not as bad you might have heard.

This guide is a brief introduction

Package managers

There are two main package managers in PHP, Composer and PECL.

Composer is the package manager used to install userland libraries.

PECL is the package manager used to install PHP extensions.

Frameworks

Laminas

Laminas is an 'enterprise-ready PHP Framework and components'. Laminas is a continuation of the Zend Framework.

Laravel

Laravel is an highly opinionated framework for making PHP web applications and set of components.

Slim

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs. For reference, this site uses Slim.

Symfony

Symfony is an opinionated framework for making PHP web applications and set of components.

High performance frameworks

As well as traditional 'shared nothing' frameworks, PHP also has some high performance frameworks. These are more difficult to write code for than traditional frameworks, that trade-off is sometimes the correct choice when you have high performance needs.

Amphp

Amp is an event-driven concurrency framework for PHP providing primitives to manage cooperative multitasking building upon an event loop, and promises.

ReactPHP

ReactPHP is a low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP. At its core is an event loop, on top of which it provides low-level utilities, ... Third-party libraries can use these components to create async network clients/servers and more.

Swoole

Build high-performance, scalable, concurrent TCP, UDP, Unix Socket, HTTP, WebSocket services with PHP and easy to use coroutine, fiber API.

Code quality tools

PHPStan

Psalm

Phan

Infection

Concepts

Although PHP is similar to other languages, there are a few concepts/names for things that people should be aware of, that might be difficult to search for.

Autoloading

PHP is interpreted at runtime. PHP is not compiled like C, Java, Go programs and also isn't built/transpiled like TypeScript/Dart.

Because of this, when the code is run, PHP may need load another file that defines a class/interface if they are not already defined.

For the vast majority of PHP developers, autoloading is taken care by using Composer.

Strict vs weak modes

PHP can operator in two modes 'strict' and 'weak'. In weak mode, if you pass a parameter to a function of a different type than expected, PHP will do it's best to coerce it into the correct type. For example PHP will coerce a float into an int by rounding it to the nearest int:

<?php

function addNumbers(int $x, int $y): int {
    return $x + $y;
}

echo addNumbers(1, 2);
// output is 3

echo addNumbers(1, 2.4);
// output is also 3, as 2.4 was coerced to an int value of 2 

In strict mode, parameters need to be of the correct type, and passing an incorrect type will lead to a TypeError exception being thrown.

<?php

declare(strict_types = 1);

function addNumbers(int $x, int $y): int {
    return $x + $y;
}

echo addNumbers(1, 2);
// output is 3

echo addNumbers(1, 2.4);

// Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: addNumbers(): Argument
// #2 ($y) must be of type int, float given

In strict mode there is an exception for promoting ints to floats

<?php

declare(strict_types = 1);

function foo(float $bar): float {
    return $bar;
}

$x = 1;
var_dump($x, foo($x));

// Output is:
// int(1)
// float(1)

By default (i.e. without any declare statement) PHP operates in weak mode.

Core

TODO...

Userland

TODO...

Extensions

TODO...