PHP Code Formatting – Closing Tag (?>) on PHP Files?

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Some people swear by closing their PHP files with ?>, some say it's more optimized to leave it off.

I know that it's not essential to have it on there, I'm just wondering what the pros and cons are of doing this, and what best practice is.

Best Answer

It's not so much a matter of performance - parsing the trailing ?> is trivial and won't make any noticable difference at all, unless you're including a million files per second.

IIRC, php.net recommends NOT adding the ?>, and the reasons go something like this:

it's unnecessary
it is easy to accidentally add significant whitespace after the ?>, which will be output to the client, which in turn can lead to obscure 'headers already sent' errors (this happens when an included file contains whitespace, and you try to set a header after including that file)

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One gotcha with using REST is defining an API. The natural tendency is to use a uri style that mimics the familar RPC style. You need to work backwards, and define your uri with the object(s) being acted upon first, and use the verbs (GET,PUT,POST,DELETE) for your operations.

SOAP in comparison has more features, but about 95%(a measure I pulled out of the air) of the features are never used. It complicates understanding it, and adds overhead to development. I would only recommend using it if REST did not provide you with everything you need.

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When you're talking about convention, there are a few bajillion different ways to do it. Ways I've seen:

index.tpl.php
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views/templates/index.tpl.phtml

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