PHP terms

9 terms of 1506 total

🐘 The engine behind the web's most-used server-side language

PHP powers an enormous portion of the web — from WordPress and Laravel to custom e-commerce platforms. This category covers the language internals, core functions, OOP features, type system, performance patterns, and PHP-specific quirks that every serious PHP developer should understand deeply. Whether you are writing procedural scripts or building full-stack applications with modern PHP 8.x features, these terms form the foundation.

More on PHP history · 5 references · key concepts

History

PHP began in 1995 as a simple set of Perl scripts created by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visits to his personal website, evolving into a dedicated language called "Personal Home Page Tools." By version 3.0 (1997–1998), it became a fully-featured server-side scripting language adopted widely for web development, with PHP 4 (2000) introducing the Zend Engine and significantly improving performance and architecture. The object-oriented paradigm matured substantially in PHP 5 (2004), bringing proper class-based inheritance, interfaces, and exception handling, while PHP 7 (2015) delivered major performance gains and type declarations. Modern PHP (8.0+, released 2020 onwards) introduced named arguments, attributes, union types, match expressions, and later DNF types and fibers, reflecting maturation toward enterprise-grade systems while maintaining backward compatibility and its historical accessibility for rapid web development. Today, PHP powers over 75% of websites with known server-side technology, ranging from simple content management systems to complex frameworks like Laravel and Symfony.

Key concepts

Constants (define vs const)
Variables & Type Basics
Arrays & Array Functions
Functions & Closures
Object-Oriented Programming Basics
Exception Handling (try/catch/finally)
Error Handling in PHP
Composer & Dependency Management

Best references

PHP Official Documentation The canonical reference for all PHP language features, functions, and standard library. Essential for accurate syntax, behavior, and version-specific changes across all 270 terms in this category.
PHP RFC Archive Official Request for Comments documenting the design and rationale behind language features like attributes, enums, fibers, and type system enhancements. Invaluable for understanding why features were introduced and their historical context.
Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart Seminal practical guide covering contemporary PHP patterns, best practices, and ecosystem tools like Composer. Bridges language features with real-world architectural patterns relevant to dependency injection and error handling.
PHP-FIG Standards (PSR) Framework Interoperability Group specifications defining community standards for autoloading (PSR-4), coding style, interfaces, and more. Critical for understanding conventions around autoloaders, DI containers, and class organization.
Composer Official Documentation Complete reference for dependency management, autoloading configuration, and composer scripts. Essential for understanding the modern PHP ecosystem and how Composer resolves the terms related to package management and autoloading.

🧠 Logic graph · PHP

159 edges here

17 verbs used

169 terms touched

10 narratives

✦ Latest in PHP

Typed relationships here

Edges touching a PHP term.

Regex in Loop Leverages preg_match() / preg_replace() 5h
HTTP Cookies in PHP Enables Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) 15h
password_hash() Leverages Argon2 Password Hashing 18h
Dependency Injection Applies Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) 18h
SameSite Cookie Attribute Configures HTTP Cookies in PHP 1d

A value object requires immutability — its whole equality-by-value contract depends on state never changing after construction. PHP's readonly classes are a language-level mechanism that applies exactly that immutability by making every declared property readonly, so the value object's defining guarantee is enforced by the compiler rather than by convention. Immutability is the shared property that carries the conceptual requirement from value_object down to the concrete PHP feature that implements it.

Value Object · by means of · 🪢 Immutability → Readonly Classes (PHP 8.2)

PHP's readonly classes connect to the problem of side effects by means of immutability: marking a class readonly enforces that its properties can't be mutated after construction, which is exactly the property immutability uses to mitigate side effects like argument mutation and shared-state changes. The readonly mechanism is the concrete language feature that realizes immutability, and immutability in turn is what carries the predictability guarantee back to the side-effects concern. Without immutability as the bridge, readonly_classes is just a PHP syntax detail with no inherent reason to relate to the general quality problem of side effects.

Side Effects · by means of · 🪢 Immutability → Readonly Classes (PHP 8.2)

Type safety relates to type coercion mainly by means of strict_types: flipping on strict_types=1 is the concrete switch that turns PHP's silent scalar conversions into hard TypeErrors. So the quality goal of type safety actually attacks the coercion problem through this declaration — strict_types is what carries the enforcement from the abstract goal down to suppressing the specific runtime behavior, and without it the coercion keeps happening even with typed signatures present.

Type Safety in PHP (strict_types & Static Analysis) · by means of · 🪢 declare(strict_types=1) → Type Coercion