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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"."
This sounds like a very good thing, and will address many of the things I find cumbersome about the language (namespaces!). But while it sounds full of objecty-goodness, does anyone know how backward compatible this will be with PHP4? It sounds like major changes are in the works, and rewriting my code in six months sounds about as much fun as putting pencils in my eyes.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
While this isn't false, it did get me on the wrong foot. It appeared to me as if the PHP developers were just realizing that stuff like design patterns exist, and started writing their code accordingly. THe article however states:
It would've been helpful if that quote had been in the post, but it makes clear that PHP5 will have much better OO features than PHP4 currently has.
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
... and why I won't go back.
... and sometimes expose it on another machine. I'm talking about adding a blank line to a script. It seemed likely that there was a memory error of some kind in PHP.
... transferring to a 3rd-party session system that was incompatible with the 4.x sessions and completely untested by us was not possible by that time.
... I dumped PHP. I was in a situation where I could not trust the underlying technology.
... IIS 5.0 and Active Server Pages. Believe me ... if there had been any other viable option, I would have taken it. mod_python looked viable at first, but I didn't have time to go through the cycle of building a single-threaded python, and verifying the underlying technology. With ASP there was a fairly direct translation from PHP.
... which was acceptable since the users are trusted. Under IIS I eventually needed to create an administrator user which a single page uses - all other pages use a Guest user.
PHP 4.2.3. Windows 2000.
90% of the way into a decent-sized project, I started experiencing somewhat random crashes. Somewhat random in that there seemed to be no consistent way to provoke them, but once they started happening they happened in precisely the same way, consistently.
Simple changes, such as adding a single character to a script, would "fix" it on a particular machine
Downgrading to earlier versions of PHP 4.x didn't fix the problem. Downgrading to 3.x was not feasible
Of course, I attempted getting the source code and finding the problem myself. Unfortunately, none of the 4.x versions would compile. The 3.x versions would - but 4.x wouldn't. Obviously, some black magic was required. Sacrifices failed.
Time was running short. Faced with a very short deadline, I made the only decision I could
As an indication of what dire straits I was in, the technology I eventually recommended to replace PHP and Apache was
I hate that this application has been written in VBScript. The shenanigans I had to go through to get a particular COM control to load and be controlled by IIS - it's system of impersonation doesn't work very well if the COM object isn't specifically designed to be used with it. Under Apache it was able to run as LocalSystem
Obviously I was doing something outside the norm, since there are thousands of web sites which use PHP as the underlying technology. I suspect most of them are running 3.x. But the sheer number of issues that I found with PHP during the relatively short development cycle convinced me that it was in no way mature enough for us to trust our work to it.