Eleven years after the release of PHP 5.0, there has been a major change in the PHP development. It has recently come up with its latest version 7, bringing a whole set of new attributes, with great performance and new language features being the most highlighted ones. PHP has taken a very long time to bring out its latest release but, has come up with equally amazing features. So, it has been worth the wait for web developers. To know about the features of PHP 7 in detail, read ahead.

But, before we go ahead, there might be a question arising in your mind – Why is it PHP 7 and not PHP 6 after version 5? This is because PHP 6 was attempted in the year 2005 but, the efforts did not succeed. The change the developers team tried to bring in the Unicode support failed. Thus, this experimental project went in for development but, was never able to release. So, in order to avoid confusion regarding the former attempt and latest development, the PHP team decided to omit the PHP 6 name for its next release and straightaway jump to PHP 7. Now, you can read about some of the features installed with PHP 7.

Speed

Speed is one of the most significant feature of PHP 7 which also means performance improvement. The speed has remarkably optimized memory usage and added just-in-time compilation, which allows compilation at run time rather than prior to execution. The speed of PHP 7 has doubled, which means that  the applications running on PHP 5.6 will run twice as fast on PHP 7. Thus, PHP 7 can handle twice as many requests per second, meaning a 100% improvement of performance. High speed will make your code execute faster and will require fewer servers to serve higher number of users. So, performance is one of the main reasons why you must upgrade your servers to PHP 7.

Error handling

It has never been an easy task for PHP coders to handle fatal errors. But, with the new ‘Engine Exceptions’ brought about with PHP 7, it has become easier to handle errors. It will allow you to replace errors with exceptions, which makes it possible to catch errors and take appropriate action. If the exception is not caught, PHP will return the same errors as is the case with PHP 5 series. In PHP 5, in case of an error, the last default is used but PHP 7 will show you a fatal error to be improved upon.

Spaceship and null coalescing operators

PHP 7 comes with two new operators known as the spaceship “<=>” and the null coalescing operator “??”. The spaceship operator works like the smaller, greater and equals to sign that we have learnt in mathematics in school. If the operands are equal, the operator will return 0, if the left is greater, it will return 1 and if the right is greater, it will return -1. The null coalescing operator lets you check if something exists and returns a default value if its doesn’t.

64-Bit Windows support

The 5.x series of PHP hasn’t been able to provide a 64-bit integer or large file support but, PHP 7 has introduced a consistent 64-bit support, which means that both 64-bit integers and large files will be supported. Thus, you can run the language on your 64-bit Windows system.

Deprecated items

It was necessary to get rid of a number of deprecated items and old and unsupported server APIs and extensions in order to free up some space to enable improvement. PHP 7 has been able to do this. Some of these items have been removed since the previous versions of PHP itself, which continues to remain removed from PHP 7 too. ASP-style tags like <%, <%= and %> along with script tags have been removed. Instead, you are recommended to use the <?php tag. The ereg extension has been replaced with the PCRE extension. The mysql extension has also been deprecated.

WHAT IS BOOTSTRAP?

Bootstrap is an open-source Javascript framework developed by the team at Twitter. It is a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript code designed to help build user interface components. Bootstrap was also programmed to support both HTML5 and CSS3.

Also it is called Front-end-framework.

Bootstrap is a free collection of tools for creating a websites and web applications.

It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions.

ADVANTAGES OF BOOTSTRAP


The biggest advantage of using Bootstrap is that it comes with free set of tools for creating flexible and responsive web layouts as well as common interface components.

Additionally, using the Bootstrap data APIs you can create advance interface components like Scrollspy and Typeaheads without writing a single line of JavaScript.

Here are some more advantages, why one should opt for Bootstrap

• Save lots of time — You can save lots of time and efforts using the Bootstrap predefined design templates and classes and concentrate on other development work.
• Responsive features —Bootstrap responsive features make your web pages to appear more appropriately on different devices and screen resolutions without any change in markup.
• Consistent design — All Bootstrap components share the same design templates and styles through a central library, so that the designs and layouts of your web pages are consistent throughout your development.
• Easy to to use —Anybody with the basic working knowledge of HTML and CSS can start development with Bootstrap.
• Compatible with browsers — Bootstrap is compatible with all modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera.
• Open Source — And the best part is, it is completely free to download and use.

WHERE TO GET BOOTSTRAP?

There are two ways to start using Bootstrap on your own web site.

• Download Bootstrap from getbootstrap.com- If you want to download and host Bootstrap yourself, go to getbootstrap.com, and follow the instructions there.
• Include Bootstrap from a CDN- If you don't want to download and host Bootstrap yourself, you can include it from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). MaxCDN provide support for Bootstrap's CSS and JavaScript. Also include jQuery:

What is Li-Fi?

Li-Fi is the transmission of data through illumination by taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through a LED light bulb. This varies in intensity faster than human eye can follow.

It is the fast and cheap wireless communication system which is optical version of the Wi-Fi.

How Li-Fi works?

Operational procedure is very simple, if the led is on, you transmit a digital 1, if its off you transmit a 0. The LEDs can be switched on and off very quickly, which gives nice opportunites for transmitting data. Hence all that us required is some LEDs and a controller that code data into those LEDs. We have to just vary the rate at which the LED's flicker depending upon the data we want to encode.

Thus every light source will works as a hub for data transmission.

Advantages of Li-Fi

• It is possible to achieve more than 10Gbps, the oretically allowing a high-definition film to be downloaded in 30 sec.
• Mostly powered by LEDs so it is cost efficient.
• Transmission of data is fast and easy.
• Its main advantage is it's bandwidth is 10,000 times than the radio waves.

Samsung has revealed that it’s now mass producing memory modules with the largest capacity and the highest energy efficiency of any and all DRAM modules to date. These modules are primarily aiming at enterprise server and data center applications, but the firm is expected to address consumer products based on the same technology somewhere down the line.

At 128GB the new DDR4 sticks have been manufactured utilizing the through silicon via (TSV) interconnect technique. As opposed to traditional wire bonding, with TSV the chips are ground down to a few dozen micrometers possessing hundreds of tiny holes that enable vertical electrical connections to pass through the chips. The TSV technique isn’t new, but it’s more advanced and allows for a significant boost in signal transmission.


The unit is comprised of 36 4GB DRAM packages divided on two sides, with each package containing four 20nm 8Gb chips. In total it’s comprised of 144 DDR4 chips. Each package embeds the data buffer function, and according to Samsung this optimizes module performance and power consumption.

The hardware almost doubles performance at 2,400Mbps and halves the power usage in comparison to the previous highest capacity DRAM modules, 64GB LRDIMMS. It’s clear that where wired bonding limited performance, TSV opens things up for a great performance boost.

In addition to revealing a complete lineup of TSV DRAM in the coming weeks, Samsung added that the firm will be presenting modules with data transfer speeds up to between 2,667 and 3,200Mbps. Following the roll-out of its enterprise hardware, Samsung says it will be expanding TSV applications into high bandwidth memory (HBM) and consumer products, though it gives no exact time frame for when we might see this development.

While it might take a few years before you see this type of memory speed in one of your everyday devices, it’s exciting to think about just what might be possible with equally powerful hardware when it hits the market.