PHP 4.2.0 Released

emmetropia writes: "PHP 4.2.0 has been released, with experimental Apache 2 support, and lots of other improvements and fixes. Check it out!"

Comments

Re:PHP functions

[tenman]

what about the XMLDB libs? please don't come out of the box ditching on PHP cause you can't think of anything better to slabdown to get the phirst post. PHP 3.0 requiered libs to connect to any database, and now supports plenty of the nativly to help techno weenies adopt the platform. But just because the authors wanted to make language easy to use, doen't mean that it not still a powerful force. You can still mod and lib the engine, and you can still tweek the install configs where it beats the pants off of an asp server. You won't hear me talk bad about the 4.0, and I don't want to hear you talk bad about it eather.

Re:PHP functions

[Fweeky]

Yeah, it's a bit ugly having a flat namespace of, let's see;

-<freaky@voi:~/src/phpdoc/en/functions>-
-% grep '<refentry id="function\.' *.xml |wc -l
2579

2579 functions.

Although I can see the argument for having all the compiled-in extensions loaded all the time, having absolutely everything in the same namespace makes writing procedural code a little dangerous, not to mention leaving a nasty taste in your mouth if you're trying to code in an OO fasion.

The answer is, of course, to put your functions in a seperate namespace (a class in Zend 1, a proper namespace in Zend 2), or to use a naming scheme that's less likely to conflict (personally I use WordCaps (or camelCase) instead of under_scores, but since PHP doesn't stick to under_score style all the time and isn't case sensitive, this isn't a wonderful solution).

Coding in an OO fasion's less an issue for namespace conflicts, and more an issue for getting procedural code thrown in everywhere unless you load performance draining wrappers. PHP's weak object model doesn't help here. After using Ruby I find myself running into PHP's limits a lot harder. *grumble*

I hope that they will move extensions to make use of namespaces sometime (PHP 5, or 6 maybe); i.e. MySQL::connect(), PgSQL::connect(), etc. If nothing else this will help make the language cleaner.

BTW, as for CPAN, some of the PHP bods are trying to produce something like it; PEAR, which includes a passable database abstraction layer, among other things.

Personally, I'd be using Ruby if it had better webserver embeddability (mod_ruby doesn't yet support Apache 2, and the Apache 1 support feels a bit immature) and a nicer CGI API. Running it as a daemon might be an interesting solution, but finding hosts who will allow that might be a bit of a pain. Maybe I should try it out while I can :)