Typed PHP: Stronger Types For Cleaner Code

PHP has a rich history and a dominant place on the web. It has achieved much despite language inconsistencies and difficulties. Bjarne Stroustrup once said: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”. PHP is one of those languages that everybody uses, yet that’s often seen as a good reason to ignore the bad parts and just get stuff done. I’m all for getting stuff done, and to that end I have used Plain Ol’ PHP for many years. It’s always bugged me how procedural PHP is, in an ecosystem of OOP libraries and frameworks. So I decided to take a deeper look at building a stronger type system on top of PHP. That’s the goal of this book. We look at using standard PHP libraries. We look at using user-land libraries. We look at using extensions and cross-compilers. All this is works towards creating a set of reusable tools which unify and ease the scalar types of PHP.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Structure
• Extensions
• Design
• Designing For The Future
• Appendices