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Professional PHP4
PHP is an open source server-side HTML-embedded web scripting language for creating dynamic web pages. Outside of it being browser-independent, PHP offers a simple and universal cross-platform solution for e-commerce, complex web, and database-driven applications. Professional PHP4 will show you exactly how to create state-of-the-art web applications that scale well, utilize databases optimally, and connect to a backend network using a multi-tiered approach.
Almost an year since its release, this book has stood the test of time, and proved to be what it promised -- an up-to-date, advanced book on PHP -- a category in which there are very few worthwhile entries to date.
It provides a solid, fast-paced drill on the rudimentaries of PHP (although the fast-paced installation instructions come in the form of classic compendia -- worth 100 pages) for seasoned programmers, before it plunges head straight into the more advanced areas of the language. Each chapter reads a bit like a tutorial on a particular area of advanced PHP development.
If you are a competent programmer in just about any other language or have grappled with HTML before, then this book will teach you PHP from scratch . It will also introduce you to many of the more advanced areas of PHP programming, and is a treasure trove for information on diverse tasks possible with the language.
Notable topics include:
- Object Oriented Programming
- Sessions and Cookies
- Coding an FTP Client
- Sending and Receiving Email and News
- Networking and TCP/IP
- Non-Web Programming (including GTK)
- PHP and XML
- PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL/ODBC
- Security
- Multi-tier development
- Optimisation
The code for the examples presented in the book is available for download, from the publisher's web site.
Although this book is reasonably complete, it lacks sufficient depth for experienced PHP developers who want to wade into the depths of specific PHP related tasks. Having said that, the publisher has provided information (of course at a separate cost) on specific areas with their second level PHP titles -- Professional PHP4 XML , Beginning PHP4 Multimedia Programming , Beginning PHP4 Databases and Professional PHP Web Services .
Suffice to say that the book has packed together a lot of diverse information (in 975 pages).
Related Links You can purchase Professional PHP4 from bn.com. (You may also be interested in the Slashdot review of Professional PHP XML of a few months ago.) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Does anyone have links to news/features on what's supposed to be in PHP5? I've been hearing rumors that it's going to be much more object oriented and easier to do serious design work in.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... the PHP website should be enough for anyone with basic programming skills. It's simple, clearly explained, and there's many examples and fixes posted by people. The only thing that would be helpful would be a PHP Cookbook that's as good as the Perl one.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Yahoo recently started using PHP to run their site. PHP is not just another toy language to tinker with, its a very capable tool. Don't confuse 'easy to use' with 'not powerful'.
When you make a complete enterprise site, you use the language that will give you the most advantage for maintainability and design.
Exactly. PHP often fulfills that need.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
yea that why Yahoo is moving to PHP and not Java hmmm and here is slashdot articke about Yahoo moving to PHP
i have worked with both and i PERSONALY prefer PHP, I haven't faced a problem in php that I couldn't have solved....
Who controls the information, controls the world...
PHP is a great solution for small to mid size businesses. Designing server based database apps is easy and they can run on Linux/MySql (duh!) which is a great kick in the TCO for a small/mid size biz. While I agree with the earlier flame regarding PHP in the enterprise I do think it works pretty well for business apps just not with thousands of users.
One thing I feel is missing is the ability to USE the host system. If I could access serial devices for example I could have a pc as a database server and one as a cash register, then I could have a serial based cash drawer at the PC being controlled by the server (this is a fairly common POS setup) this would be very useful. (I know I can use Perl to do it)
I've been using php for about 5 years professionally and have actually been looking into using Java, mostly because I'm interested in the concepts behind MVC design.
But one of the things php has given me over the last 5 years is total rock solid stability. I mean, I've hacked up some complete crap code over the years but I've never once had a php related crash(and apache only ever crashed when we tried integrating Cold Fusion into it).
In testing Java servlets I have gotten out of memory errors in a database app I've written, but that could very well have been a lack of knowledge on my part(maybe I had the server misconfigged). I'm reading up more on admining/designing for Java now and will do more serious tests in the future.
But don't dismiss php as a toy language. The code you create can be messy, but it's rock solid stable. 5 years of 80k+ lines of code without any crashes is nothing to laugh at.
So whats new in this edition?? Whats diff between the professional PHP 4 book I bought like 2+ years ago , and this book?? or is this just an insanely late book review???
Actually, I thought they migrated using PHP for background scripting, not on actual pages that are displayed (I think they still use a proprietary C system).
Of course, this is all out of my memory, not actual links.
Funny thing is, I wasn't gonna start the "J2EE vs PHP for professional site" flamewar, and then someone else goes and starts it.
And PHP doesn't have the greatest OO built in that most architects drool over.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I was going to pick up this book, based on the recommondation of friends (programmers) and online reviews, but when I thumbed through it in the bookstore, it just seemed...weak. Thin.
This is PROFESSIONAL PHP programming, not BEGINNING PHP. Why even have the 100 or so odd pages on installation? This book is not targetted at newbies, it is for the serious developer. OK -- you're a J2EE dude who want to check it out; doesn't have PHP installed. Lots of references on the Web, and if you can't find them...you're not a Web developer.
While the book probably would be helpful as a reference in some cases, I was just disappointed in it. The cookie/session section was a joke (and this is new in v4, so should be fairly rigorous).
I didn't buy the book. And I like having references around. I have 7-8 open on my desk right now, from Perl through DHTML to PHP. Oh well, as people have noted, v5 is coming, so I guess we shouldn't get our packets in a bunch...
It depends on what exactly the enterprise size app is doing and what it needs to connect to.
:)
For example, an enterprise wide phone extension list could easily be done using PHP instead of Java.
A complex work-flow application might not be the best fit for PHP. A whiteboard collaboration tool definatly would not either, PHP-GTK not withstanding.
I've used PHP to call both Java and VB COM objects on the same page. I had to work with two different groups in a company, one used Java, the other used VB. It was easier to use PHP than to write a wrapper for either.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Thanks for the link. Now I can say, with confidence (from the article):
Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting
Backend scripting != PHP pages on yahoo. This article wasn't read very well by slashdotters. They aren't converting yahoo over to PHP, they are using it for scripting.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
So the book is still up to date, even an entire year after it's release?
Something's wrong here... Those php people better get on the ball and start releasing more often! The only language I know of that's stays that stable is COBOL.
No point in playing with it, unless it's the latest bleeding edge, crashing and burning on a regular basis. On my Windows box, that is - my BSD box remains rock steady.
Nope, still not funny.
*nuke blows, code bloat and feature creep gone horribly awry. You can't even rip them apart and fix it to your site's needs without hours of headaches and eventually deciding to roll your own.
Hammer of Truth
...a true troll who has never used the language. Or at the very least hasn't used it enough to see the true power and simplicity it provides when used correctly.
BlackNova Traders
Without the equivalent of Perl's excellent DBI/DBD
Like ADODB?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I doubt PHP5 will be available any time soon. The 4.3 branch is in a release cycle now (RC3). The Zend engine 2 is very much an alpha work in progress.
I would think a stable release of PHP5 is still quite a ways off.
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
And why do you think Java/J2EE is the best choice for an "enterprise" solution? The best choice has nothing to do with the language...it has everything to do with how the compiler/interpreter is implemented and what your developers are comfortable with...oh, and a word on portability, it is a pipedream for any application that is built for an "enterprise".
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
I started playing with PHP and MySQL sometime ago, just to see what it was all about, and all I can say is wow. I've learned so much, and started doing some small contracts with PHP. Its so nice to be able to take a .html doc from a web developer, cut the dummy data out and add in a couple of PHP lines, and bang, the page is now live to the database!
DBI/DBD is a library written on top of PERL just as ADO, ODBC, JDBC etc are libraries written on top of other languages.
PHP has many such libraries to choose from. Here is a short list (you can google for the exact locations)
ADODB, Metabase, PEAR, PHPLib.
Please do some research before you post lest you look like an ignorant fool.
War is necrophilia.
Everyone that flames PHP needs to go sit in the corner and remember not to break their magic bubble of personal space. First the slashdot article is about the book not the language, second use whatever works for your needs. If PHP works for you and like it thats wonderful. If not use something else, there's a lot of other options.
PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preproccessor". Not "Personal Home Page". It hasn't meant that for years.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I think it depends on what you need your site to do. If all you need is to run database queries and output the results (basically what /. does) then languages like PHP, Cold Fusion, Perl work fine. PHP and Cold Fusion make these kinds of tasks very easy to do and they scale just fine for these types of applications. Where I always run into problems is with applications that require much more...connecting to sockets on other servers to retrieve data and then parse data (XML etc), connecting to booking systems, middleware or mainframe systems, manipulating images on the server that kind of stuff. It seems most enterprise applications end up going beyond what languages like PHP and Cold Fusion can provide without having to write custom tags in C/C++ or Java or something to make up for the shortcomings of these languages. At that point you might as well write the application in J2EE or something that is a little more robust than what most of the web scripting type languages can provide.
I see php in lots of very busy sites.
Just today I noticed that Insight is using php. I am pretty sure they were not using that before and migrated to php from something else.
War is necrophilia.
I've been using PHP quite heavily for a few years now; I never picked up a PHP book, not once.. Why? Simply because the community support, the IRC channel, the Online Documentation and even places like devshed simply have so much to offer! I have not even once printed or purchased even a mere shred of dead tree painted over with ink that describes or outlines PHP in any way whatsoever.
You can write your own extension (in C for instance) to interface with the hardware - and provide the PHP functions you want.
See here for details...
BlackNova Traders
What are you going to be using the language for? That is a key deciding factor.
Now if only I could actually find a job where I could use it.
:-)
Anybody?
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
(* Designing server based database apps is easy *)
If you mean data input and query screens, I have to take some exceptions to that. Simple stuff is indeed simple in web apps. However, B-to-B and intranet managers often want GUI-like behavior from browser-based apps, and HTML+JS+DOM can turn into a tangled mess under such demands.
The developer cannot just say, "well, this is an HTML browser, not a GUI, so it will not have all the functionality of a GUI", because that would be a half-lie. With enough effort and spahgetti code, you *can* make it do GUI-like stuff, but the code is usually horrible. The current standards are optimized for e-brochures, and NOT e-biz-forms.
What is needed IMO is HTTP-friendly GUI browsers, using protocols like XWT and SCGUI (I'm still looking into Mozilla). (I rule out non-HTTP protocols because fire-walls often don't accept them. Some protest this, but I don't want to rekindle that debate here.)
There is a huuuuuge need for such in my observation, and no vendor is stepping up to the plate. PHP could still serve as the server-side part of such a system, BTW.
Table-ized A.I.
I agree. That's why we did a rough port of DBI to PHP for my workplace PHP environment. It's amazing what you can do when you actually sit down and write code, instead of bitching about something not being able to do x.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
"And PHP doesn't have the greatest OO built in that most architects drool over."
Actually it has "pretty good" OO. In some ways it has "pretty advanced" OO like mix-ins. PHP5 will have "even more advanced" OO.
Anybody who uses J2EE for a "less then enterprise" web site is just asking for pain. Better to stick needles in your eyes it would hurt less.
If you really want to use java go with webobjects.
War is necrophilia.
One - the book is OK, but out of date if only because of the 'register globals' stuff - they shouldn't have assumed it was on in a 'professional' book in the first place, imo.
Second - shameless plug - we offer PHP training classes. here
Third - PHP topics always devolve into 'java/perl/.net/asp/cf is better than PHP'. Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers. Not as 'one language beats all' but to present some tests which aren't sponsored by the companies (MS, Sun, whoever) which obviously have a BIG bias as to how they want the results to appear. Having a cross section of multiple developers from multiple platforms agreeing to common test terms would help eliminate that, I think.
creation science book
- You already have a bias toward Perl, and
- You're talking to Perl experts, which means
- They're probably geeks and Slashdotters
something along these lines should work:OK, I didn't really have anything useful to write. I just like making HTML lists.
We recently switched from perl to PHP. Perl seems to be much better and handling file manipulations and it definitely is more a more complete language. But developing in PHP is so fast that the switch was easy.
.html with cgi-bin/php, all of my pages would still be served fine (although slower if run as a CGI.) What this means is that our layout people can design pages and we can easily put in code after the page design is done to make it look just like they want it. If they then want to move stuff around, they can (for the most part). They can even use editors like frontpage (and it won't complain about the php code if you use the code delimiters.)
With PHP, the default "thing" in a file is html that it just spits out. You have to do something special to make PHP code to run. So if I configured my server to handle
Also, with PHP you can also do things like this:
<? if (somthing) {?
Something was selected
? } else { ?
Something was not selected
? } ?>
so when I am printing out large chunks of html based on some variable, I can just use html without messy prints all over the place. Of course, you can use perl "print EOP" type statments, but I think the PHP approach is more elegant.
Also, the fact that PHP takes care of all the variable collection was a big plus for me. I just type testing.phtml?id=2&name="jeff" and sure enough, $id=2 and $name=jeff. Obviously, you can do the same thing in perl and it's not terribly difficult. But in PHP it is just that much easier and it's one more thing I don't have to worry about.
I would strongly recommend that you at least try PHP for a simple mail form or something. I think you'll fall in love with it for web stuff. And if you're doing database work too, then I think you'll really like it.
I like PHP and web apps, and code a little here and there... but I must say that if you are designing a business app, security is of the utmost importance. Therefore, it seems to me that you can design a regular app (QT/$backend, or some other combination) to run on the server, and have the clients log in via ssh or something similar and have the app run on their desktops via port forwarding/X forwarding. This seems to me to be way more secure than SSL web applications, and eliminates the deficiencies you just mentioned.
Ok, there are problems with this scenario (what if the user's connection drops occasionally?), and these would be hurdles to overcome, but my point is that while web apps are 1337, there are other more traditional and perhaps easier ways of making an app with the kind of gui that's needed for business apps
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
MVC is just an object-oriented design concept. There's no reason you can't do it with PHP. And, if you want a "middle tier" for PHP (persistent objects/connections, brokering, etc...), check out http://www.vl-srm.net/
Has anyone worked with the Smarty templating extension? It seems like it would lead to better MVC use, but I haven't had time to use it yet. Will I be wasting my time?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I know there are accelerators out there, but most people not know about or use them. Plus I really can't see the harm in including a accelerator in the default engine. Does anyone know why it is not included? There are open source accelerators that can be distributed with PHP.
Many scripting engines eg. Cold fusion, JSP, compile code only the very first time the code is executed since the module was started, then only check to see if the code was changed on disk before executing the already-in-memory code.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
With that said, I feel that the top reasons to use PHP rather than perl are:
I realize that most of this won't convert a perl advocate (what would?) especially if they're going to be the sole coder on a project, but that's rarely the case with real production systems.
Related links: Google: php vs perl, Web Automation: PHP vs. Perl vs. PHP
To answer your question about how/when perl is compiled, it depends on the situation:
As near as I can tell, PHP pages are compiled each and every time they are served, along with all the included code.
I'm too lazy to click any of the book links, and I'm sure many people here have the same question anyway, so I'll post: does the book show variables the old way (just ask for $whatever and it pulls the value out of the air from POST, GET, etc.) or the new (4.2+) way where you need to say $_GET['whatever'] or $_POST['whatever']?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Actually it has "pretty good" OO.
..
If I' had modpoints right now, I'd mod this up as "funny"
Any C++ or Java Developer will loose his hair (I he has any left) when reading things like this or this
(the later has nothing to do with oop)
One thing that stirkes about PHP is it's position in the market. It simply ownz all other SSI technologies out there. From ASP over JSP to Cold Fusion, PHP is one of the outstanding successes of OSS.
Yet all these SSI technologies have in common that they still don't manage to really split Design from content. I was all in for PHP as my way of doing SSI stuff until I ran into TAL. It's the second (next to DTML) SSI Language that comes with Zope and has been reimplemented in Perl (PETAL). The essential difference to other SSI solutions like the #1 PHP is that all SSI-relevant tags only come as parameters to standard HTML tags and thus absolutly don't interfere with WYSIWYG HTML tools or other stuff that belongs to markup. You even can get good editors to switch of the non-html tal parameters to do your markup uninterfered. Once on the server content of tal-parametered markup (tal-speak: "mockup") get's replaced with the dynamic content. The point is: Either way you have documents that can be previewed in browsers, edited and formated without the source code for serverside dynamics being touched - or vice versa.
A simple trick to establish true separation of content and code.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I haven't OO'd my PHP because I know the implementation sucks. I'm patiently waiting for PHP 4.3 (or whatever it is), and then PHP 5.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
It's not hitting the net anytime soon.
PHP 4.3 is still in the midst of release cycles, and things aren't perfectly smooth, as always. Chances are it won't be out for another few weeks (a month or so is probably a safe guess)
PHP5 will be ready... well, when it's ready. Nobody even started thinking what should go into PHP5 yet. Aside from Zend2, which you can use already with PHP4 tree.
If you have a big feature - ask for it, but currently there is nothing that is groundbreaking enough to even start working toward version 5.
Jobs? Which jobs?
I've done a fair bit of development in both PHP and Perl (mostly web development, which is what I assume you're referring to). I'm not a PHP expert by any means, and I've been doing Perl for much longer, so take that into consideration.
Perl is more succinct. Depending on your point of view, this is a good or a bad thing. You do need to acquire a higher proficiency with the language than is necessary with PHP in order to really make this useful, and to make sure that less experienced programmers on your team aren't confused. Things like use English; can help, but if someone really feels like shoving an evaluated regex into a map call, you can't stop them. (I feel like this often). I find that I often resent how much more typing I have to do in PHP.
Perl is more mature. PHP is coming along rapidly, but things like recent major changes with super-globals and default config options (register_globals) do make it feel a little unfinished and slightly unplanned. They're just growing pains, but you still have to deal with them.
This is also reflected in the documentation. PHP has pretty good documentation. Perl's is excellent. It's had a few more years to polish it.
Debugging is much, much easier in Perl. The perl command line debugger is a great tool, and I wish PHP had something like it.
If you don't have control over where it's going to live, PHP is easier to deploy. This is the single reason I use PHP almost exclusively for web development these days, and I hope this is addressed in Perl6. With PHP I can simply specify PHP version x and MySQL are required. If PHP is on the server, it's almost guaranteed that MySQL is and that's it's all hooked up nice. With Perl, if you need something that requires a C extension (eg, DBI), the host may or may not have it, depending on how much the admins like installing extra stuff. If you have appropriate access you can install it yourself, but if you don't, you're out of luck. Whether or not this is an issue for you depends on where your planning to deploy.
CPAN. CPAN is marvelous. There is an immense amount of useful Perl code in there. If you want to do something, there's a good bet someone else has wanted to, too, and contributed it. The PHP community is working hard at building something like it, but CPAN has years on it.
Regarding perl compilation - I was going to take a stab at it, but it's been too long since I've had to read up on it, and I'd bullocks up the details. If you have a copy of the camel (version 3) handy, there's a good section on it in there. Sorry, don't have a link handy.
HTH
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
This was a decent attempt at a troll, but I feel you could have gone much further with this. You see, the hallmark of a truly great troll is the ability to push something to such an extreme that it greatly offends everybody, even people who agree with you. With that simple principle in mind, allow me to re-format your original post so that it fits snugly into the mold of a great troll.
Ahem...
I learned php a few months ago, but I think I'll stick to perl. If you're making some simple web pages that just need to be marked up, I guess php is okay, but why bother adding a php module to Apache when you've got mod-perl?
Should read:
I learned PHP a few months ago, but I think I'll stick to machine code on the bare hardware. If you're making simple web pages, why bother letting an enormous pile of cruft (like all of Linux) get in your way when you've got all the power and simplicity of machine code available? Besides, who really trusts a big, creaking mass of code put together by a bunch of Communists in Finland?
In Perl, the language helps you, but php just seems to get in the way. Without the equivalent of Perl's excellent DBI/DBD, I don't see much use for php.
You missed a golden opportunity here. Here's an easy fix:
In machine code, the machine helps you by locking up and smoking when you make a typo, but PHP just seems to get in the way by spitting out a bunch of cryptic error messages. Why pollute an already clean error-reporting mechanism (the machine locking up and setting my desk on fire), with a bunch of crud like "Error: Syntax error in line 16", when high-level messages like that only abstract away the true source of the error? Frankly, without the equivalent of machine code's clear and easy-to-understand near and far pointers (on x86, of course, but who really uses that RISC crap, right?), I don't see much use for PHP.
So now, armed with a more complete understanding of the True Way of the Troll, the next time you make a boob of yourself in front of all of Slashdot, you'll do it in a thoughtful, thorough manner.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
I agree with most of your post, but "Perl's documentation is excellent?" It works well as a reference for someone already familiar with Perl, but as an explanation of the language it's hideous. It's written as manpages, with names like "perlsyn," "perldata," and "perlre."
The Camel Book, on the other hand, is great.
But for electronic documentation, PHP has perl beat by a mile. It is organized, comprehensive, and user-annotated.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
heh. Point taken. This is probably one of those places where my being more familiar with perl colors my opinion. It can be hard for someone new to it to find what their looking for in the pod. I still think that, once you've figured out where things are, it's generally more polished than the PHP docs. I often find those cryptic, and sometimes downright unhelpful. And the user-annotation on the PHP docs _can_ be great, but it can also be downright inaccurate. Not that I don't think it's a great idea, and I check it frequently myself. You just have to be careful with it. POD's got a long ways to go itself - it could learn a lot from, for example, the JavaDoc format. But I've always found the content very to the point and "expert friendly."
Which is maybe one of the big differences - the perl docs aren't really meant for learning, they're for reference. When I'm in a hurry, they're just what I want. As always, YMMV.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
performance wise, i think perl and php are on the same level
... and let me tell you - its major pain.
i started out with php and then slowly moved to perl. i still have a lot of apps in php that i have to manintain once in a while
php is really easy to learn and implement, but it lacks infracstructure. on the other hand, in perl you get away with a lot more things and its true that if you are not careful perl will get obfuscated and unmaintainable very fast.
beauty of perl comes in when you put effort into developing strong infrastructure and stick to it. always use strict, -wt (warnings and taint mode). organize your code into neat modules (CGI::Application) and use a templating system (HTML::Template is very simple and wont let you clutter html with code). note that php doesnt have any of this features as readily available as in perl through CPAN modules
when it comes to documentation, it might be true that php has good resources online, but perl has a lot larger comunity (check out perlmonks.org) i got replies on my questions within 30 minutes of posting!
in short... perl has superior architecture to php, however php has better corporate support and better learning curve
However, I think thats true of any web content program no matter what language its programmed in. I've seen Scoop/Slashcode frustrate people as much as PHP-based programs.
However, I think PHP works outstanding as an abstraction layer between SQL and the web for smaller sites.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
- The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.)
- Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
- Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in most cases. File handling and regex come to mind immediately. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
- Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
- Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice!) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl coders because Perl is an excellent language. However, in certain cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl. Thank you, ETC - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
TAL looks interesting, but it does get tiring reading people say over and over things like this:
"Yet all these SSI technologies have in common that they still don't manage to really split Design from content."
Any web scripting language worth its salt has at least one templating system available for it. For PHP I prefer smarty.
The links you point out all refer to the fact that php does not act exactly like C++ or Java. Once you actually learn the way php works those particular things don't bother you anymore.
Yes php does not work like C++ or java I don't think anybody is arguing the opposite. I suppose lisp, smalltalk, ocaml, python and perl also don't work like C++ or Java. That's life.
On the other side neither C++ nor Java allow you add methods or attributes to objects at runtime and PHP does. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but I like it and whenever I use a language like java It makes me loose my hair when I can't do it. You have to take each language as it comes.
War is necrophilia.
One of the main reasons yahoo went with php instead of java is that freebsd currently has lousy thread support, which is quite essential for java apps.
Another thing is that they still use their proprietary backend code, they are not going to rewrite that in php (or java for that matter).
I lurk on the php-dev mailing list, and one thing that I'm worried about with respect to the direction PHP5 is taking is the support for namespaces. The latest preview alphas of PHP 4.3.0 with Zend Engine 2.0 (as opposed to ZE 1.0, which powers the latest stable version, PHP 4.2.3) has demonstrated some of the above features in action (but they are, of course, still in-development.) The current 'implementation' (and I'm using that word loosely) of namespaces/packaging is something called 'nested classes', and let me assure everyone of the following: Zend Engine 2.0's "nested class" feature do nothing for implementing useful namespacing! Nothing!. They don't even work for logical things you would think they would. With nested classes, only the parent class can extend any other, and the nested ones absolutely cannot! Example: Even the latest from-CVS snapshots (cvs co php4-ze2) crock with a very specific error message: "Nested classes cannot inheirit." So how exactly do these help in namespacing? They don't.
Even the following like seem like a logical ability for nested classes, but ZE2.0 just doesn't support it:
So, hopefully the above looks like a start, and, of course, this would provide the necessary generic interface so that other RDBMS could be implemented according to the same mechanisms. However, the above doesn't even begin to work as expected in PHP with Zend Engine 2.0.. In the MySqlDatabase class, we might see a nested class like 'Connection' and think it would relate to the parents' subclass by the same name. So, using condensed symbolisms, like this:
* P is parent
* P defines 'n' as a nested class (P.n)
* C is child of P (in PHP, 'class C extends P
* C defines 'n' as nested class (C.n)
I would propose that it would make sense that 'C.n' implicity extended 'P.n'. That could be useful, for example, in the above database example: a single root class, SqlDatabase, could provide a variety of interfaces that are grouped together and not disjoint. So not just a bunch of related classes like MySqlError and MySqlConnection but a single MySqlDatabase class (with nested classes) that implicitly in the language relate the nesteds' amongst themselves.
But nested classes are not namespaces. PHP needs a syntax like that of Java mixed with Python, and, being a scripting language, PHP should allow namespaces to be first class language objects that can be manipulated, and they should have clearly defined scoping rules. Example: I admit that the scoping rules could be tightened. For example, after a broad 'package x;' statement, what if you wanted to define the contents of a subpackage using the 'package y { }' syntax but wanted the 'y' namespace to be under 'x' (so that anything defined in y would be prefixed globally by 'x.y.')? Edge cases like that would need careful consideration, and the only thing I can think of at the moment is a separate 'subpackage' keyword that would work in conjunction with 'package x.y.z;' definitions to consider 'subpackage w' to be really referring to a 'package x.y.z.w' definition.
I just want PHP to be even greater because I love it. I am working to document some of these ideas and the make the case for some more of these kinds of additions to the language, as well as coding the patches against ZE2.0. If anyone would like to share their ideas with me or help me work on this, please feel free to email me at pete (at) petrasync (dot) com (and sorry for some of the misformatted code blocks -- they are a tad difficult to get right.)
Pete