Discovering core OOP coding differences

There are a number of significant changes to how you are able to write OOP code in PHP 8. In this section, we focus on three key areas that might present you with potential backward-compatibility breaks. The areas we address in this section are common bad practices associated with making static method calls, handling object properties, and PHP autoloading.

After reading this section, and working your way through the examples, you are in in a better position to spot OOP bad practices and to learn how PHP 8 has placed restrictions on such usage. In this chapter, you learn good coding practices, which will ultimately make you a better programmer. You will also be able to address changes in PHP autoloading that can potentially cause failure in an application migrated to PHP 8.

Let's first look at how PHP 8 has tightened up on making static calls.

Handling static calls in PHP 8

Surprisingly, PHP versions 7 and below allowed developers...