PHP 5 Beta 1

Sterling Hughes writes "The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Downloads are available in both source and binary form (for Windows users). A full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog. Some of the new features include much improved OO support, completely revamped XML support, and the default inclusion of SQLite."

Comments

Problems with newer versions

[Sanity]

I recently developed a number of sites in PHP and ran into serious problems when it became clear that most hosting providers use older versions of PHP, and are scared to death to upgrade lest they screw things up for their existing users.

The PHP people need to provide ways that people can upgrade the versions of PHP on their system such that they can be reasonably sure that existing users aren't suddenly going to find their sites don't work.

Re:Problems with newer versions

[Sanity]

If you're doing a non-trivial php site, and trying to make it work with different versions of php (osCommerce, for example), you end up having to rewrite many functions yourself to make sure they work consistently.

Absolutely, this is exactly the experience I had.

I like PHP, but it suffers from an "incrementalism" design approach. Some stuff really needs to be rethought, and I think PHP 5 is on the right track to doing that.

I hope you are right, but right now I am more concerned about how to deal with differences between different PHP4 versions - it is immensely frustrating to inadvertantly use a function only to discover that it doesn't exist on your new ISPs version of PHP (and of-course they won't upgrade for love nor money lest they upset their other users).

Someone involved in PHP needs to take a cold hard look at this issue and figure out how to tackle it head-on, or they will find that with each new version, people take longer and longer to take advantage of new features which will cause PHP to stagnate.

With Java, at least I know for a fact that some Java 1.1 code will work with Java 1.4 and as a result most ISPs keep their Java versions quite up-to-date.

Until the PHP team treat lack of backward compatability as a bug, this problem will persist.

Re:They pulled MySQL out!

[baptiste]

Ah - well man they need to be clearer about it - the phrase makes it sound like they pulled out MySQL support. The Changelog mentions the library - but even it is really brief. I always thought PHP used your local libraries anyway - I didn't realize it came with them in 4.x

Re:Windows Users

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

The sources can be compiled under Windows and most Unices.

But since Windows doesn't come with a compiler, there is a binary provided for Windows.

So what's your point?

Re:Kiss and say goodbye to Java language!!

[alannon]

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

How did this barely-literate rant get modded up to +2? What difference does it make that PHP is written in C? Java is written in C, and the JIT has some hand-coded assembler in it as well. So what? The HOWTO that is linked to hasn't been updated in 2 years and the benchmarks linked in the HOWTO are no longer even on the web.

The raw speeds of execution between JSP and PHP may be similar (though I suspect that JSP ends up being much faster once the JIT has kicked in and optimized it, after a few executions). Additionally, there are many different JSP runners (Tomcat is only the reference implementation) and the performance between them can be very large (I recommend the JSP runner by Caucho for performance-critical systems. Besides this, PHP and JSP have a very, very large difference between them:

PHP is usually run as a apache mod or sometimes, as a cgi. Because of this, it cannot store session state or cache inside of its process (since the process is either apache httpd, or the cgi, which terminates at the end of a page run). To get around this, any session variables get serialized and stored to disk at the end of each run, then un-serialized at the beginning of the request. This also means you can have no application-level caches of database information, since there is no place to put these. This is fine for small stateful sites or large stateless sites, but for any serious, large web application that has to maintain a lot of state, this ends up being a big performance disadvantage.

JSP, on the other hand, is run from a servlet runner in a persistent process outside of the apache process. At the beginning of the request httpd makes a socket connection (usually a local unix socket, very fast) to the servlet runner and sends the request there. This is slightly more overhead than everything running in-process, but gives you the huge advantage of being able to cache whatever data you wish to inside the servlet runner's process. This means database lookups can be cached, sessions don't need to be stored in disk, timers for maintenance functions can be set, all within the servlet runner's process. This is great for large, complicated web applications but obviously not great for small, stateless systems, since it requires the overhead of a running JVM at all times you want the application to be available.

Two different types of systems, two different purposes. I happen to use both in my professional web development, but use only java servlets and JSP for serious projects.

PHP fragmentation, lack of cohesion

[theolein]

I've been using PHP since the 3.0 days and always loved it's speed in development for small dynamic sites. There is truly nothing simpler (IMO) for small sites. Why on earth did PHP ever become so popular as compared to Perl/CGI? It was the simplicity.

Most people accepted the changes from PHP3 to PHP4 without complaining as PHP4 brought simple session support and other needed features. Thousands of developers wrote scripts for small pages and uses, and those scripts got placed on help sites etc all across the web.

The changes above 4.06 where register_globals got turned off by default and -from a simple beginners point of view- to 4.2 where a stunning array of new arrays were added for sessions, post and get variables. Those things broke almost everybodies scripts, and all those thousands of scripts across the web no longer worked as is. Due to this a lot of ISP's no longer upgraded regularly.

At the same time PHP started jumping on the "web application" gravy train, something for which PHP with it's awkward OO support (no automatic calling of parent constructors etc), lack of stateful session support etc was not designed to do. The makers of Zend decided to go the whole hog and redo OO support, add hundreds of seldom used features but ignore problems with backward compatibility and language simplicity.

Congratulations. Now we have a language that is slowly matching JSP in complexity (as all the 1337 "application developers are saying"), is nowhere nearly as well integrated in in true web applications as JSP is (great, it can support Java classes, how many will simply use Java then?) and is leaving the roots of it's enormous success behind.

Take a lesson from Perl's "failure" in web site popularity. Don't keep on adding features for the love of it.