sirPaul writes: "PHP 4.1.0 is out @ php.net. "It includes highly improved performance, especially under Windows; A new, and more security-friendly way of accepting form variables; Output compression, and much, much more." Check out the changelog."
Looks like I might be able to sneak PHP in here now. I've been using it for my own web development projects for a few years now and all I can say is, it kicks ass. Congrats to the PHP crew!
If you're trying to decide which direction to go in web development, take a real close look at PHP. It totally smokes.asp and can do virtually anything you can do with java, except for client side stuff like applets. It's extremely fast and pretty straight forward to learn. Can you tell I like it?
It's actually grown beyond just web development lately. I've taken to using it for minor system administration scripts from the command line - sort of a 'Perl Lite'.
Also, PHP-GTK looks like a promising development for future client-side applications...
New Input Arrays
by
n-baxley
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The new input arrays sound like a great idea that is long overdue. Bravo to the PHP team for producing a well thought out implementation and still providing backward compatability.
Now y'all can rip me apart for being positive in a/. post.
MS working on PHP??
by
stienman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was really surprised to see this tidbit:
We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows
Not that I'm against MS making PHP faster on windows (the environment I run it in currently - XP, Apache, PHP), but you'd think that MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP.
-Adam
You shake and shake the ketchup bottle - first none comes, and then a lottle.
Something you may consider is that not EVERY Microsoft employee necessarily feels negatively
towards Open Source stuff like PHP.
For example, if they really want to help Mircrosoft, then indirectly this is a good move.
By making the competition better, your department has to improve even more. So it is very likely
that somebody from a non-ASP department at Microsoft may have done that to try to increase the
quality of the ASP software they are forced to put out to compete with PHP.
Sorry for opposing the common Anti-Microsoft ethos here on/., but it makes sense if you think about
it. A little friendly between-department competition (well, maybe not friendly). I'm sure it happens
at most corporations.
Re:MS working on PHP??
by
stienman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, MS is internally very competitive. Apparently when faced with a choice between two competing technologies, Mr Gates often decided to wait awhile and see who produced better results. It can be very cut-throat.
You can read more about this on other sites on the internet - I have a relative working there, but of course we never talk about stuff like that (as most MS employees are discouraged from talking about such things, and business and pleasure don't mix) so I have, at best, third hand knowledge, but it seems reasonable.
-Adam
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Re:MS working on PHP??
by
DrSkwid
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
maybe you don't get it but ASP means active server pages, PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages, another is VB Script, but perl, python, ruby, rebol are also included.
ASP is simply the name Microsoft chooses to confuse the world with. The rest of the computing planet uses CGI as the acronym. By using ASP it FUDs people because then people think that Unix doesn't have ASP.
So you see PHP isn't a competitor it's an ally. What MS want is NT/2k/XP deployment not vb script.
Once deployed it's hard to change, even if you did think that p*'s cross platform nature was going to help you. Once your scripts become complex enough then 'MS only' stuff leeches in (pathnames for instance) and moving over becomes too much hassle and for what gain?
XP, Apache, PHP -- spot the weakest link:)
-- There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:MS working on PHP??
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
-- There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:MS working on PHP??
by
mgkimsal2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages.
Sorry, wrong. VBScript, Jscript, and to a lesser extent PerlScript are languages that have ASP 'hooks' - 'seamless' integration into the ASP environment. PHP is not one of those languages, unless something has DRASTICALLY changed, and I think we'd have seen a more specific announcement about that.
PHP runs as an ISAPI module under Windows - hopefully it does NOW anyway. It was pretty flaky in the past. Hopefully this 4.1 release remedies a lot of that. A few core PHP people were invited to MS some time ago to discuss how to make the ISAPI version more stable. There were apparently many threading issues, and the PHP team didn't have much in the way of specific MS experience - not as much as the Unix experience the developers bring to the table.
PHP is most definitely a competitor, as is perl. WHY would I tie myself to coding ONLY on windows (via VBscript, ASP, etc) if I can just as easily take that code and port it elsewhere? Same issue as Java - my PHP code will run without change on a unix server or a windows server. So it's most certainly a competitor, no doubt about that. Throw in the price tag for PHP/Perl/etc ($0) and it really *should* be scaring MS some. At least it probably rattles a few cages in certain departments there.:)
Throw in the price tag for PHP/Perl/etc ($0) and it really *should* be scaring MS some.
Actually, If you're running on a Windows box, ASP is free with the included IIS. If you compare to PHP on a Linux box there is a price difference, but Apples to Apples (just to confuse things) PHP vs ASP is the same price on the Windows platform.
MS derives no income from ASP. They do, however, derive income from the sale of NT/2k/XP/whatever.
Anything that makes those platforms of more universal appeal makes them more money. Similarly, if they did charge for ASP, a sane business decision would be to make versions available for things besides MS operating systems.
True, they don't sell Office for anything but Windows and MacOS, but that's probably a cost/benefit decision (as in "X dollars for a linux Office team would only make sense if revenue Y is greater than X" (probably X + required profit margin)).
It isn't hard to predict what MS is going to do given a set of stimuli. However large they may be, whatever their corporate culture might be like internally, they're a business like any other (public traded) business (operating in a near or total monopoly).
True - but it's not cross platform, which is what I was getting at. The "price" aspect was intended to be related more to the cross-platform quality, rather than standalone. PHP being cross-platform should be somewhat more threatening to ASP than something like CF, because of the price. Just a viewpoint, anyway.:)
Why the surprise? MS injected $250 million into the Perl/TCL area through ActiveState. Why not support PHP too? Perl is actually now a.Net language that fully integrates with the.Net IDE! PHP doesn't have the syntax flexibility to reach that level, but anything that MS can port from the Unix/Linux world is a plus for them. It makes it easier to swallow that world if you can run all of its software.
PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages
No, PHP runs in a separate space to the ASP stuff. AFAIK you can't use PHP as a plugin language in the same way you can with VBScript, JScript, PerlScript etc.
PHP either runs as a CGI or in an ISAPI process.
ASP is simply the name Microsoft chooses to
confuse the world with. The rest of the
computing planet uses CGI as the acronym.
Not really. CGI scripts traditionally run in a separate process with the associated overhead of process setup and teardown for each request, while ASP pages run in-process with the web server. Similar to a language-independent mod_perl or the way PHP runs inside Apache.
In my experience developing cross platform stuff in PHP is easy, you shouldn't have absolute pathnames running round in your code anyway (except in config sections), and PHP - like most scripting languages - is very tolerant about using forward slashes on Windows so relevant paths are fine too.
Re:MS working on PHP??
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I think it's quite simple really...
If you are to run the windows version of PHP - what OS will you have to use? Windows!
So if MS can improve php on windows... *nix ppl might go to windows... Not that *nix ppl usually does so, bot those that have doubts...
I mean it's not like MS is just doing a good deed here. It's all money;)
Re:MS working on PHP??
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Sorry, this wasn't in reply to the reply, but the whole topic!
Non-Windows performance?
by
yelvington
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· Score: 1
The announcement says "Highly improved performance in general.... Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows."
This suggests that Unix/Linux performance is improved. Anybody have details on that? Performance metrics?
Re:Non-Windows performance?
by
swright
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The changelog says they've made hash tables a lot faster; these are used for all types of arrays in PHP. This should make quite a bit of difference, but I couldn't see anyhthing else that was faster...
Binaries do not come out right away
by
mickeyreznor
·
· Score: 2
Something to learn about open-source projects is that binaries for them do not necessarily come out right away. They have to build the program for various platforms and test each binary, which takes some time. You should compile from source, anyway. That'll guarantee it working:) Anyways, be patient they'll get binaries soon enough.
Re:Binaries do not come out right away
by
Wonko42
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I was mostly joking. Just letting off steam after having tried to compile it with Cygwin and having it fail miserably, and I don't own Visual C++ so I can't compile it that way (which is the recommended method).;)
Re:Binaries do not come out right away
by
ryants
·
· Score: 2
You might be interested in this:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-12/msg00612.htm l
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-12/msg00676.htm l
I have not tried the 4.1 yet, but 4 had these problems/annoyances:
1. Session variables were more complex to use than ASP's
I've used 'home-grown' session stuff because in the early PHP4 days, the session_register stuff didn't work right when overriding the built-in session-handling to use a DB instead of files. What I do now is put all session variables into one array ($session) and can use it pretty similarly to the ASP model, which I think under VB was session()
VBScript - session("foo") = "bar"
is now
PHP - $session["foo"] = "bar";
2. Lack of a wrapper function makes name conflicts more likely for form vars, session vars, cookies, etc.
If you use the built-in definitions they give you, you have $HTTP_POST_VARS, $HTTP_GET_VARS, $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS, etc., all as arrays, so you can simply use them the same as you would VBScript's request("foo") model. I don't remember how I could determine if a variable was POSTed or GETted under ASP. ???
3. Case sensitivity. I hate that.
Biggest problem I have with it is that it's not 100% one way or the other. Function names are case-insensitive, yet variables are case-sensitive.:(
4. Semicolons
It's easier for me to figure out semicolons than the &_ stuff used to multiline statements in VBScript. Haven't used it in awhile, but I remember it was a pain. It's easier for me to just break stuff into 2-3 lines if need be and use a ; at the end. You learn to put a period at the end of a sentence. Changing your thinking to punctuate every code line with a ; shouldn't be such an 'annoyance'.
5. No direct module-level vars
What do you mean by this?
6. Too many arrays needed to access
mySQL.
Use any number of DB abstraction packages out there. PHP comes with the PEAR project code, and others are available for free as well. ADODB might be a worthwhile package to check out, as it's modelled after the MS ADO stuff, and was/is written by at least one guy who's coming from an MS background.
Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
linuxbaby
·
· Score: 1
I'm not a programmer. Just a musician who learned some PHP out of necessity for my website.
Now I know PHP pretty damn well - and I'm getting to LOVE programming web-based applications.
I've read about Python, and I'm starting to wonder - for those here who know Python - is there any reason to learn it? (Besides just curiosity or learning OOP.)
Is there a lot Python can do that PHP can't?
I don't mean in its methods ("PHP can't do real OOP!") - but in a practical sense.
Should I just stick with PHP or is there a big reason to learn a whole new language?
Thanks!
Re:Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
mgkimsal2
·
· Score: 2
Dunno enough about Python to answer for certain. One of the other guys in the office used it quite a bit, and kept coming up against oddities in how it handled certain situations. Don't ask specifics right now, cause I don't know them. But I do know that we keep coming back to PHP and using it more and more. Yes, there are some things it can't do very well, but pretty much every language we've looked at has some deficiencies, either in terms of learning curve, or strange behaviours, or lack of support/acceptance, or whatever. PHP seems to satisfy the most needs, while having the fewest drawbacks, when talking about primarily/strictly web-based apps.
Email me privately if you'd like to discuss this further.:)
Re:Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
Micah
·
· Score: 2
Agreed with previous replier. PHP is about as good as it gets in terms of database-driven Web apps. And Python CGIs wouldn't perform as well as PHP scripts, except maybe with mod_python, which I know nothing about.
I'd say learn python ONLY if you want to write standalone (non-web) apps or scripts, which it is quite good at. use the right tool for the job.
Re:Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
So trying not to get into a religious war, which is better? mod_php or mod_perl?
I've worked quite a bit with mod_perl and Oracle8 with a large number of object oriented.pm libraries to back up the Perl scripts for various website functionality at work.
Can PHP do the same?
Re:Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
Strudleman
·
· Score: 0
PHP is great for web-apps, definatly. I use it exclusivly. But Python is much more flexible. It is an excellent language for the web, but beyond that you can pretty much write anything you want in python(aside from Kernels and device drivers). If you're sticking with web programming, stick with PHP. But if you have any interest in writing stand-alone apps or system scripts, take a good look at python.
-- Do it doug.
Re:Anything Python can do that PHP can't?
by
Micah
·
· Score: 2
I believe it can. I use mod_perl for Slash, and it works fine, but if you're not careful it consumes a horrendous amount of memory. On the plus side, it's a bit faster than PHP (unless you add the Zend optimizer) because Perl can cache psuedocompiled code in Apache.
For *most* web applications, i really believe PHP is the way to go. It strikes a good balance between performance, features, and memory usage.
Slashdot Mirror
All these wonderful Windows enhancements, and where are the Windows binaries? Woe is me! What's this "source" stuff?
Looks like I might be able to sneak PHP in here now. I've been using it for my own web development projects for a few years now and all I can say is, it kicks ass. Congrats to the PHP crew!
.asp and can do virtually anything you can do with java, except for client side stuff like applets. It's extremely fast and pretty straight forward to learn. Can you tell I like it?
If you're trying to decide which direction to go in web development, take a real close look at PHP. It totally smokes
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
The new input arrays sound like a great idea that is long overdue. Bravo to the PHP team for producing a well thought out implementation and still providing backward compatability.
/. post.
Now y'all can rip me apart for being positive in a
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I was really surprised to see this tidbit:
We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows
Not that I'm against MS making PHP faster on windows (the environment I run it in currently - XP, Apache, PHP), but you'd think that MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP.
-Adam
You shake and shake the ketchup bottle - first none comes, and then a lottle.
The announcement says "Highly improved performance in general .... Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows."
This suggests that Unix/Linux performance is improved. Anybody have details on that? Performance metrics?
I looked at a prerelease and didn't see anything about that, although I thought I recalled reading about "issues" with it previously.
In case you were wondering who is Brett Brewer, named on the PHP changelog, I did a Google search, and found that he's Co-President and Chief Operating Officer of a company name EUniverse.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Something to learn about open-source projects is that binaries for them do not necessarily come out right away. They have to build the program for various platforms and test each binary, which takes some time. You should compile from source, anyway. That'll guarantee it working :) Anyways, be patient they'll get binaries soon enough.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
(quote) It totally smokes .asp (end quote)
.NET crap comes.
I have not tried the 4.1 yet, but 4 had these problems/annoyances:
1. Session variables were more complex to use than ASP's
2. Lack of a wrapper function makes name conflicts more likely for form vars, session vars, cookies, etc.
3. Case sensitivity. I hate that.
4. Semicolons
5. No direct module-level vars
6. Too many arrays needed to access
mySQL.
On the good side, it won't be totally overhauled like ASP will when that
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not a programmer. Just a musician who learned some PHP out of necessity for my website.
Now I know PHP pretty damn well - and I'm getting to LOVE programming web-based applications.
I've read about Python, and I'm starting to wonder - for those here who know Python - is there any reason to learn it? (Besides just curiosity or learning OOP.)
Is there a lot Python can do that PHP can't?
I don't mean in its methods ("PHP can't do real OOP!") - but in a practical sense.
Should I just stick with PHP or is there a big reason to learn a whole new language?
Thanks!