New features in PHP5+ | PHP7

New features in PHP5+ | PHP7

PHP 7 is scheduled  to be released on Nov 2015. So what are the new things that a PHP developer must learn to beat the heat of php. Starting from PHP 5.3 there are many new things that are added to PHP, some of them are  explored below.

1 PHP 5.3

1. Closures - Closures and lambda functions can make programming much easier
2. New INI files - Two new INI files which will replace the current INI's packaged with PHP. One focused on production deployments and the other focused on development deployments.

2 PHP 5.4

1. Traits - Mechanism for code reuse in single inheritance languages such as PHP. It is intended to reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling a developer to reuse sets of methods freely in several independent classes living in different class hierarchies.
2. Short array syntax - [ ] === array()
3. Builtin server - php -S localhost:8000

3 PHP 5.5

1. Generators -  Generators provide an easy, boilerplate-free way of implementing iterators.
2. Finally keyword - try catch finally 

4 PHP 5.6

1. Inbuilt debugger -  A PHP debugger
2. Exponential operator - **

5 PHP 7.0

1. Anonymous classes - Classes with no names
2. Combined comparison(Spaceship) operator - <=>
3. Return types - Adds return types to functions, methods and closures
4. Null coalesce operator- ??
5. Scalar type hint

Note: For more insight checkout below links:

• Php internal RFCs
• Stackoverflow PHP chat room