Slashdot Mirror
PHP5 Coming Soon
Grip3n writes "PHP5 is well under development and a beta is expected out by March 2003 and released summer 2003. One of the more notable improvements which many PHP developers desired is a substantial improvement in PHP's performance. This is due to a new object model PHP5 will be introducing which handles objects by reference rather than by value. Co-creator Zeev Suraski states the new object model is inspired by the book, "Design Patterns"."
That's just another Smashdot snafu. The article clearly says, "PHP version 5, expected to appear in beta form by March, 2003, and released in the summer of 2003..."
Moore's Law has NOTHING to do with this. Moore's Law has to deal with the density of transistors on an integrated circuit.
The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Um, if you did that then you wouldn't be able to embed your variables in a string, Perl-style.
If you think about it, the PHP way is easier.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
...or why python is better on the backend and the front-end.
.NET as well-thought-out enterprise component frameworks.
Take namespaces for special-purpose library stuff. Or inline eval (include) of logic code (bad, bad, bad). Good analysis (mine) here, including comparitive code to demonstrate my point.
Like Java, Python already does assignment by reference, copy is optional. PHP is just figuring this out. PHP's language leaves much to be desired in team programming and code readability. Using 'Design Patterns' is only half the equation. You can do component oriented programming, but some languages are going to be better than others at facilitaing it in a manner that works in reality. PHP5, unfortunately, won't hold a candle to Zope 3, which is really going to compete at the level of J2EE and
PHP lacks object persistence, multiple inheritance, full-featured transaction machinery, a built-in security model, an interactive command-line interpreter, and it is too tied to web-scripting only. And becuase it doesn't have a security model that binds operations to roles/permissions, it can't easily put gateway methods with bound roles (like Zope's proxy roles) between web code and SQL code, leading to increased chance of SQL injection vulnerabilities.
On the other hand, Zope has object perisistence, transactional RDBMS integration and connection abstraction, templated, componentized SQL methods, a security framework, and Python, which is a much better language (explicit is better than implicit). And if you need to do any sort of content-management, Zope has a mature component-oriented framwork in the CMF, with a killer-app implementation in Plone. It also has XML-RPC, WebDAV, Caching managers, and all sorts of other goodies you won't find out of the box in PHP.
PHP is fast, and it is easy, but it is by no means scalable. PHP offers a gentle slope learning-curve, and quick easy hacks, but is somewhat like a crack addiction. What PHP as a framework needs to do is not reinvent the wheel in the language department, and use a pre-existing, scalable, enterprise-class OO scripting language, and utilize a templating technology that doesn't promote mixing logic and presentation - but what's the point, since it would look remarkably like Zope?