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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"."
How come there is no mention of this on the PHP Website?
I just wish that there was a way to compile PHP into some sorta byte code. 'cause then you'd write your Mysql, XML, expat, imagemagik, and other php modules IN php. THEN it'd be truely portable.
Problem is, if your php module you wish to compile in isn't written for your system, your are screwed. Besides, using your language to develop your language forces the language to be bulletproof after age.
I've run into some oddities with php when you push its limits.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Well, I have a couple of opinions.
:)
1. PHP is a little easier to learn than Perl (at least it was for me).
2. PHP was designed specifically to generate dynamic HTML, whereas Perl seems to be more of a general purpose language.
Then again, sometimes it depends upon the application. There are some things that may be easier to implement in one language than the other, you may need the features of one that the other lacks, etc...
Others may, and probably will, disagree
It's mostly a matter of entrenchment. Perl, being a more general purpose language, would likely perform better than PHP in a lot of areas, including web apps. PHP, however, is known as a "web language" simply because that's where it was marketed too and where it's used. People could (a few do) write full GUI apps in PHP, but there's no real advantage to using it in such an area when there are better options available.
At some point in history, PHP provided a few features which were relatively novel at the time, at least in the Free software arena, which has a tendancy to be a bit behind the rest of the world. [1] At this point though, you can get templating ala ASP in plenty of free and open languages, including perl.
I could be full of it though- other than having the benefit of entrenchment, does PHP have any features that truly set it apart from perl, python or any of the more mature languages?
[1] Not in all areas of OSS, of course, but this statement is relatively true for the mainstream of OSS. There are interesting projects and acedemic research things going on that are doing new and interesting things. Like the regular mainstream, most people in the OSS mainstream aren't interested in doing things better so much as doing them as they already know how.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Why are PHP and Perl paired together so often? (I like both languages; don't get me wrong.)
After spending some time toying around with both, their syntactic similarities seem superficial, like the fact PHP has that "$" prefix on its variables and that they use the ugly "->" operator for OOP.
They seem like distant (free, open-source) cousins at best.
Joe
http://josephgrossberg.blogspot.com/
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
However there are some things which I think need to be cleaned up.
The language is a great big mud puddle of libraries and helper functions. It would be nice if libraries could be imported at script run time (They could be sitting in memory waiting to be imported to negate speed issues) instead being available all the time. Ie If you want to use a function you must explicitly import the module containing the function. Why do I need MSSQL, Postges and MySQL connectivity all at the same time?
And I really hate prefixing all variables with '$'. Maybe they can do something about that...?
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
Bzzttt - wrong.
There are not MILLIONS of people running PHP under IIS4 and 5, and it's your responsibility to prove that there are that many. It just doesn't work reliably under IIS in ISAPI mode period, which is what most people would want. Running as CGI is godawful slow, and millions of people are not going to pay $ for Windows specifically to use an extremely slow option for dynamic web stuff.
creation science book