PHP recently released the second update in their PHP 7 series. PHP 7.2 brings fresh updates, including necessary security measures, new additions to the core, modern cryptography, and faster load speed for sites. Our web development experts list the latest features. advantages, and reasons why your should be using PHP 7.2 below.
What is PHP?
PHP is a widely present open-source general-purpose scripting language that can be up in HTML. Originally part of Personal Home Page Tools, it now stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor,” a recursive acronym similar to naming conventions in UNIX systems. PHP’s open source server-side scripting language is present to write dynamically generated web pages. The scripts run on the server, sending the result to the browser as plain HTML.
We highly recommend (if you are not a developer) to contact your host support and ask for PHP updates; this will make your site faster and protect you from errors.
Advantages To Start Using PHP 7.2
PHP is compatible with almost all servers and database standards, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server. Offering fast performance up by a large, open source community, PHP can be present for a variety of purposes, such as generating dynamic pages and files. PHP allows you to store and manage information in a site database, collect data from a web form, and send emails to users. PHP also has security features to help encrypt data and restrict unauthorized access to your website.
Top PHP users include Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, and CMS’ built using PHP include Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.
PHP 7.2 Updates
The latest PHP version 7 includes essential security improvements, performance enhancements, and exciting new features. The helpful guide is to see a baseline infographic of version 7 capabilities.
Libsodium is Part of the Core
The application-layer cryptography library Libsodium is now part of the core in PHP 7.2. Previously, the library is available through PECL, another recursive acronym meaning “PHP Extension Community Library.” So, the inclusion of Libsodium makes PHP the first programming language to add modern cryptography to its standard library. As a result, this ensures the cross-platform and cross-language library enables encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing, and much more.
Argon 2 in Password Hash: Reasons To Start Using PHP 7.2
Argon 2 is an award-winning hashing algorithm. It won the 2015 Password Hashing Competition, bringing a secure alternative to the Bcrypt algorithm on the previous version of PHP. It is designed for the highest memory filling rate and effective use of multiple computing units while defending against tradeoff attacks. Bcrypt only allows for one cost factor, whereas Argon 2 takes three cost factors: memory cost, time cost, and parallelism factor.
The memory cost factor defines the number of KiB that should be consumed during hashing, while the time cost defines the number of iterations of the hashtag algorithm. The parallelism factor sets the number of parallel threads used during the hashtag. In conclusion, here is more information on how Argon 2 addresses these factors.
Performance
According to benchmarks from Phoronix, PHP 7.2 runs 13% faster than 7.1 and 20% faster than 7.0. It’s 250% faster than PHP 5.6, but over 40% of WordPress users still have not updated. Other tests support these findings. Official PHP benchmarks demonstrate that PHP 7 is twice as fast as 5.6 with half the latency, while Kinsta’s benchmarks show it to be three times as quickly.
Deprecations
As with each update, several deprecated functions and features will be removed no later than PHP 8.0. The full list of deprecated functions can be found here. These features will work in PHP 7.2, but error messages will appear during use in log files. Developers should check the code to update any deprecated functions before they become backward incompatible.
Support
PHP 7.0 reached the end of its security support on December 3rd, 2017. Critical support will still be available through the end of 2018, but the PHP community no longer provides support for bugs or minor issues. PHP 7.1 will follow suit on December 1st, 2018. Upgrading to 7.2 ensures the latest security updates are supported continuously by the community.
With essential security updates, Libsodium in the core, and vastly improved performance features, migrating from older versions of PHP to PHP 7.2 is an easy and critical update. For more information on how to update, see the official guide here.