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

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.