January 2016

Jumping in with PHP 7

After reading Why we are requiring PHP 7 for our new packages I decided to make Stupid Simple Invoices (a side project) require PHP 7. #

It’s a fairly small project right now and it took me a total of about 30 minutes to make sure everything was ready to go. I updated composer to require php >= 7.0.0 and I added declare(strict_types = 1); to all my files and added scalar type definitions and return type definitions. #

I only had to make one little change, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. I had a method that would return an array or null and now instead of null it returns an empty array. #

This logic will most likely be refactored away in a later version, but it’s perfectly acceptable right now. #

It’s my goal to transition the two applications I work on at Pinpoint to be running on PHP 7 if possible for the speed improvements, but since they are much larger it will take some time to add type declarations to the codebase. #

All of my side projects moving forward will be PHP 7 unless there is a really good reason for it not to be. #