Does the SPL still have any relevance in the Brave New World of PHP7?

Description

Largely ignored under PHP5, the SPL (Standard PHP Library) offered a powerful toolbox for developers, ranging from it's horrendously named collection of Iterators, and a series of Interfaces allowing us to build our own, to DataStructures, and Object Oriented file handling classes. Fast and powerful, the SPL provided a stable and well-tested library of classes and functions But with all the performance and memory improvements of PHP7, SPL has remained unchanged, and feels like it has been left behind. Now, Generators provide a simpler replacement for writing our own Iterators without all the boilerplate code that SPL's core Iterators require, especially with the introduction of "yield from" in PHP7 for recursive Iterators. And PHP7's performance improvements allow us to write our own Datastructures (based around standard PHP arrays, or custom objects) that are as efficient as SPL's basic Datastructures. So does SPL still have any purpose or value in this new world of PHP7? Let's find out!

Informations complémentaires

• Slides
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• Audio : anglais

Mark is Head of Design and Development at Innoved (Innovative Solutions for Education) Learning, based in Wigan; a company which (coincidentally) shares offices with his favourite Rugby League team, the 2013 Superleague and Challenge Cup winners, and which occasionally gets him free tickets to attend Warriors games. He has been working in the computer software industry since before symbolics.com was registered as a domain name, before the term "cyberspace" was first used in fiction, when Linus Torvalds and Rasmus Lerdorf were still at high school, and Mrs. Zuckerberg had yet to give birth to a bouncing baby social network enabler; and has been developing for the Web in a variety of languages since the days when the Tim Berners-Lee's creation comprised less than 1,000 sites. Over those years, he has contributed to a number of open source projects: some still extant, others lost to history, including a minor submission to PHP's SPL. Currently he is coordinator and lead developer for the PHPExcel library, and a coordinator and developer on the PHPOffice library suite (PHPWord, PHPPowerPoint, PHPProject and PHPVisio). Most recently, he has been working on new datastructures such as Tries, Quadtrees and Matrices; hoping that he'll eventually be able to get them included in SPL. His particular interests include PHP integration with office suites, Generators, Datastructures, Textual analysis, Geodata and geographic information systems, and "big data" and data analysis.