With Drupal 8 due to land later this year, the Drupal community is about to get a crash course in modern PHP. More of Drupal will use object oriented programming and its related design patterns. More of Drupal will be based on libraries that "weren't invented here." More of Drupal will require an understanding and use of a popular tool called Composer for dependency management (a mixture of Drupal's module .info files and drush). If you haven't been heavily involved in the development of Drupal 8, all of these changes combined can be overwhelming or come with no perceivable benefit. However, that doesn't have to be the case. You can begin learning now to improve your own development capabilities and deliver better results to your customers by making the most of modern PHP even in your Drupal 7 projects. This presentation introduces what a Drupal developer or agency can to do today to prepare for this future.

1. MAKINGTHE MOST
OF MODERN PHP
Ryan Szrama, Commerce Guys
DrupalCamp Asheville 2015

2. RUN FASTER,
JUMP HIGHER
… when you use PHP
the right way.
http://www.phptherightway.com

3. • Deliver more capable projects in less time.
• Improve the quality of your Drupal modules.
• Prepare yourself / your team for Drupal 8.

4. My real world example:
Integrating aTaxonomy Web Service
API integration, taxonomy term
creation, and tag management.

5. My real world example:
Integrating aTaxonomy Web Service
Delivered as a PHP library integrated
into Drupal in 50% of the estimate.

6. MODERN PHP IS
OBJECT ORIENTED
• Interfaces, Classes, Inheritance, Namespaces,Traits
• Class autoloading based on namespaces
• Object oriented design patterns are everywhere;
for example, consider Dependency Injection…

7. <?php
// In this case, Cars can only use
// a single type of engine.
class Car {
protected $engine;
function __construct() {
$this->engine = new Engine();
}
}
$car = new Car();

8. <?php
class Car {
protected $engine;
function __construct($engine) {
$this->engine = $engine;
}
}
// Use whatever engine you want.
$engine = new NormalEngine();
$car = new Car($engine);
$engine = new TurboEngine();
$turboCar = new Car($engine);

9. <?php
// Quick example of a dependency injection
// container in a Slim 3.x app.
include 'vendor/autoload.php';
$container = new SlimContainer();
$container['thing'] = function($container) {
return (object) array('doer' => 'done');
};
$app = new SlimApp($container);
echo $app->thing->doer;

10. MODERN PHP USES
INTEROPERABLE LIBRARIES
• The PHP Framework Interoperability Group
(PHP-FIG) discusses and ratifies PHP Standards
Recommendations (PSRs).
• PSRs are independent standards, not successive
levels of compliance. (e.g. PSR-4 deprecates PSR-0,
and a project can be PSR-2 without anything else.)

11. MODERN PHP USES
INTEROPERABLE LIBRARIES
• PSR-4 (or PSR-0):Autoloading
• PSR-1 / PSR-2: Coding standards
• PSR-3: Logging interface
• PSR-7: HTTP Request and Response interfaces
• Learn more at: http://www.php-fig.org

12. See them in use in Slim 3.x, created by Josh Lockhart
(a.k.a. @codeguy), author of Modern PHP
and PHP the Right Way.
http://www.phptherightway.com

13. <?php
// A smaller codebase than Drupal’s is
// easier to digest while learning.
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
$app = new SlimApp();
$app->get('/', function($request,
$response, $args) {
echo 'Hello, world!';
});
$app->run();

14. Read more: http://ryanszrama.com/topics/slim
In fact, learning to develop with Slim 3.x helped me
better understand essential concepts in Drupal 8.

15. COMMERCE 2.X IS BUILT ON
STANDALONE LIBRARIES
• commerceguys/intl (Currency formatting)
• commerceguys/addressing (Address formatting)
• commerceguys/zone (Address grouping)
• commerceguys/enum (Enumeration data structure)
• commerceguys/tax (Tax management)

16. MODERN PHP
USES COMPOSER
• Dependency management
tool; functionally equivalent
to .info files + drush make.
• Project information is
sourced from packagist.org.
• Excellent built-in support
for Packagist in GitHub.

17. {
“name”: “rszrama/negotiation-middleware”,
“type”: “library”,
“license”: “MIT”,
“require”: {
“php”: “>=5.4.0”,
“psr/http-message”: “1.0”,
“willdurand/negotiation”: “2.0.0-alpha1”
},
“autoload”: {
“psr-4”: {
“NegotiationMiddleware”: “src”
}
}
}

18. https://www.previousnext.com.au/blog/drupal-8-now-phpunit-tests-drupal-7
Bonus points: dig into PHPUnit to automate unit
testing your code… even on Drupal 7.

19. MODERN PHP IN DRUPAL 7
• Write API integrations and data modeling /
manipulation functions as standalone libraries.
• Ensure those libraries do not depend on Drupal.
• Use adapter classes or dependency injection to
make use of that code inside of Drupal.

20. MODERN PHP IN DRUPAL 7
• Drupal 7 only requires PHP 5.2.x, so its core
autoloading API does not support namespaces.
• Instead use Composer / the Composer Manager
module to manage your project dependencies.
• At least use PSR-4; to reach the larger PHP world,
consider using PSR-2 and the MIT license.

21. MODERN PHP IN DRUPAL 7
• Use the Standard PHP Library’s exception classes
or create your own more specific exceptions.
• Use try / catch to avoid crippling fatal errors…
EntityMetadataWrapper exceptions, anyone?
• Speaking of the SPL, check out the various data
structures it provides out of the box!

22. http://www.slimframework.com
If your project has components that don’t require a
full Drupal bootstrap, consider Slim 3.x or a similar
micro-framework to get off the Drupal island.

23. Learn and adopt the language improvements, tools,
and design principles of modern PHP to become a
better Drupal developer today.
Questions? Find me onTwitter: @ryanszrama