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

They pulled MySQL out!

[baptiste]

Check this:

Due to issues surrounding the MySQL 4.0 license, the MySQL are no longer bundled with PHP. For more information on these licensing changes, please refer to the MySQL Licensing Policy.

Wow - that's not a smart move. I guess this is a GPL (MySQL) vs Apache (PHP) license issue? Anyone have more details?

Turning into Java?

[alannon]

Take a look at the OO changes page. The syntax seems to be converging with Java. I find this amusing in some ways.

Requires Microsoft Visual C++

[yerricde]

MySQL isn't bundled with it, but you can easily add it yourself when compiling.

Compiling?

Compiling PHP for Windows requires the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler version 6.0 or later.

The Microsoft Visual C++ optimizing compiler version 6.0 or later is available only from Microsoft as part of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, which costs $1,079 for one non-academic seat. (Microsoft no longer sells a Visual C++ optimizing compiler separately.)

Some people are bound to bring up the $109 Microsoft Visual C++ Learning Edition, but 1. the EULA attached to its library probably does not permit distribution of generated binaries nor public performance (i.e. use on a public web site) of generated binaries, and 2. because it does not have an optimizer, the speed of generated binaries is closer to that of an interpreted program than to that of a compiled program.

If I had any spare time, I'd fix this by porting the build to MinGW.

Re:Problems with newer versions

[Motherfucking Shit]

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.

The only major compatibility issue that I can think of between, say, the 4.1 branch and the 4.3 branch is that register_globals defaults to 'Off' in newer versions. If you leave it that way after installing, then yes, a lot of older scripts will break. Most of the shared/virtual hosting providers I've had to do script installs on, which have actually upgraded their PHP versions, just installed 4.2x or 4.3x and then manually turned register_globals back to 'On' in the php.ini file.

To the best of my recollection, there isn't much else that's not backwards-compatible. Even where functions have been renamed (e.g. socket_get_status), the old function names still work, and while deprecated, they don't seem to be going anywhere soon. I have no trouble digging up stuff I wrote back in '99 or 2000 and getting it to work under PHP 4.3; though I do have to enable register_globals in those cases.

Only problem I ever ran into with PHP where stuff quit working after an upgrade was on a test Apache2 server. It turned out to be a bug related to posted form data. I wouldn't use Apache2/PHP on a production server yet anyway, though; and 1.3.27 still gets the job done. I haven't had time to play with PHP5 yet, so I'm not sure what the differences are in that version.

I agree at the surprising number of hosts who simply haven't updated, though. There are a lot of hosts still running 4.1x, and even (yikes) 4.06, who just won't upgrade for whatever reason. I do most of my coding these days on 4.2 or 4.3, and have run into plenty of belligerent hosts who refuse to upgrade from a two-year-old release. Typically I just have my clients move to a better host; the providers who don't stay reasonably with the times will eventually figure out that it's hurting their bottom line.

Re:Kiss and say goodbye to Java language!!

[Anthony Boyd]

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).

Substantiate that statement.

Hey HeadDown. You're right to take the guy to task, s/he made some crazy comments. But I can at least partially substantiate speed issues. Back in 2000, I worked with Sabeer Bhatia (the Hotmail guy) on a startup called Arzoo. Our product (a Web site similar to epinions) was almost 100% Java, except for a bit of Perl for screen-scraping and searches. But anyway, it was slow -- first with Tomcat, then with JRun. At one point, we gave a private preview to 1,000 journalists. They didn't even visit the site all at once, they trickled in over the course of 3 days or so. Just that was enough to hammer the site. We ended up running cron jobs that would reboot the farm, round-robin, just to solve memory issues and instability.

Now, you can say, well, that was 2000! Try it now! OK. At SST, we have a team that is using Tomcat now. Although the instability is gone, the speed is still an issue -- they have wait screens as you click through the app. My team is working with PHP, and has no wait screens, and no need for them (with 1 exception). Our pages are actually more computationally stressful than the Java stuff, yet PHP is delivering the result to the browser faster.

As a final point, you might suggest that the teams I've worked with do not understand Java or how to run it well. It's no skin off my back if you make that argument -- it's not me doing this stuff, so no blow to my ego. But I think working with 2 different teams over the course of 3 years says something. Perhaps, at the very least, if Java really can handle a bigger load, it is so difficult to tune that mere mortals would do better with PHP.