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PHP 5 RC 1 released
An anonymous reader writes "PHP just released the first release candidate of PHP 5 after 4 beta releases. It is considered stable and feature-complete -- so get testing!"
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RC1 != stable
Don't assume it's stable, until PHP 5.0 (stable) comes out. Here's what the article on php.net says:
quite stable - stable enough for everyone to start playing with
(wooo RC1's out!)
It's funny, I remember when it was a main tenet of programming that data should be separate from presentation. However, PHP has shown just how powerful integrating data and presentation can be through inlining code directly into a webpage layout.
As Perl seems to fade more into irrelevence, languages that hold onto a strong central theme like PHP, Python, Ruby, and Dylan are coming to the fore to take its place. Whenever I see a story about PHP, I think more about the death throes of Perl than about PHP itself.
I have been pwned because my
Hmm... why do we always get new expressivity features and library extensions, instead of new safety features and ways for statically checking our code (such as type checking, a novel but, admittedly, completely impractical and academic invention that only freak languages use)?
I guess because people like me prefer to complain and use other languages instead of fixing unsafe ones...
Old but still funny.
Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP
Didn't have to jump through any hoops that weren't explicitly mentioned to get it installed, and haven't noticed any problems so far. Hopefully this is a sign that the official PHP5 is soon to arrive.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
move to PHP
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
I guess a lot of PHP user base was once doing mod_perl and CGI. I personally use JSP, but often find it too cumbursome for quick hacks.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Actually, PHP folks seem to think mixing business and display logic is a bad idea (like the rest of the world): smarty.php.net
be careful upgrading, as the semantics regarding object assignment have changed from copy to reference. i know some of my code would make use of the old copy-on-assignment semantics.
other than that, looks like version 5 introduces some cool stuff, ala java. abstract classes, exceptions, method visibility, and interfaces to name a few. can't wait to give it a try.
- for all but the most trivial sites, separating code & presentation is a Good Thing
- PHP supports this kind of separation. google for template libraries.
Funny that a site using "death throe" Perl could take down a site running PHP.
Death throe - whatever.
Paul Seamons
Huh?
Having been a big PHP fan, let me assure you that PHP has a strong central theme like a kleptomaniac with ADD has a strong attention span.
Having been a big PHP fan, every story about PHP releases reminds me of the page long list of vulnerabilities and issues under it's entry in netbsd's package listing.
Having since moved to perl, I'm wondering if those death throes you're talking about are the same ones that haven't arrived on my BSD machine yet...
I just think about how easy it is to create something with PHP. Not necessarily the death throws of Perl. I started with CGI and Perl, and did quite a lot of it many years ago. I've worked with ASP too; I liked the flow of it, but it was too microsoft centric. When I came to doing web programming again, PHP was what was available, and I LIKE IT! Very powerful.
Any language that has a 4000 page Help document that is extremely easy to use and find information, is an excellent programming language.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
(since /. has an established base of well-tweaked high quality/high performance Perl code),
Is this a troll? Every couple of weeks, I am plagued with "Internal Server Error" messages on this site, or I am plagued with the inability to view anything but the front page.
Thats not even mentioning all the bugs and HTML issues that are plaguing Slash.
Slash is OK code, but by no means is it the polished professional code you make it out to be.
I remember reading within the PHP docs about how unsafe it was to use the 2.x release branch of Apache with PHP...something to do with thread safety if I recall.
Anybody know if PHP 5.x has overcome this limitation?
PHP5 is an excellent choice for prototyping because of the integration between display and function,
What the hell?! If you've been involved in any kind of app deployment followed by its maintenance (especially web apps), you'll know that keeping presentation and code separate is extremely desirable. Integration of these two is a weakness, if anything.
Having said that, PHP itself is no worse or better than say mod_perl in that regard. If you use a template library with PHP, you can accomplish some nice separation of presentation and code. But them mod_perl has excellent and mature template libraries also.
Once again, it's not about the language. Use a language you enjoy and then surround yourself with appropriate tools and libraries.
Speed: they're all "fast enough." All of these scale well enough that for most sites you won't care, and none of them really scale well enough to support something like cnn.com. [Read through the archives to get a feel for the pain /. has to go through to serve its audience, for instance. And /. isn't even THAT big.] No flame; just that all these options are low/middle end.
/. is a case in point. There's a reason /. doesn't upgrade to the latest & greatest very often.
/. I know, but of these, ASP.NET is probably the best choice. If you want a toolkit/language that won't make site maintenance hell, OpenACS (tcl) or Zope (python) is probably a better bet. If you want something that will scale to absolutely huge levels (like the aforementioned CNN), J2EE is about the only game in town. (But a living hell to code for -- not recommended for smaller projects!)
Ease of use:
Classic ASP is pretty close to Perl. ASP.NET is a rather different paradigm, with a slightly steeper learning curve but more than enough added power to make it worthwhile. Unfortunately ASP.NET is a classic "leaky abstraction;" it tries to make things simple that sometimes aren't, and this will bite you.
Perl: it's nearly impossible to maintain a substantial site in perl with multiple developers working on the code. The language works against you here. Again,
JSP: takes a PHP-ish approach but Java is a statically typed language which makes using it for web apps _extremely_ verbose in comparison to the other languages here.
Javascript: poor fit for server-side use. Nobody does anything serious with it that way.
Verdict: They all suck to one degree or another. It's heresy on
I was on to post exactly the same thing. Programming php without using templates is not an unefficient solution, but quasi impossible practice.
It will lead to a complete disaster once redesign time has come.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
An article discussing some of the new PHP5 features.
MT runs on Perl, (not even mod_perl at that) not PHP.
If it ran on PHP (or even mod_perl), it probably wouldn't have the scability issues it currently has.
I stand corrected.
-fucko
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I wonder if I can install both so I can play with php5.
http://saveie6.com/
(I see plenty of Windows users adding PHP to systems that already support ASP)
In any case, all the talk of "good" design ignores all the new and not hardcore coders who can play with something like PHP (as well as ASP) but not so much Perl.
(note aslo that Apple includes PHP on their OSX boxes)
My point is that, in my opinion, one of the things so nice with PHP is that it's just fun to play with. If some coders want to "inline" their code, let them, and let them have some fun, eh.
It's like the pre-Web days when "designers" got into scripting with HyperCard and Lingo.
Everybody's welcome.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Problem is, a lot of these +5 Insightful and +5 Interesting comments are coming out of the mouths of people who have played with one or both languages. Just because you were succesful in creating a shitty little web page in PHP and had trouble in Perl does not make you an expert (note: by you I don't mean parent poster.)
I can testify that PHP (4.x) is fast enough for most situations where it'd typically be used (though I don't really know how well it'd do on a high-traffic server compared with other solutions). However: the interpreter feels pretty slow once you start handling megabytes of data at a time. For instance, I have a web app where the user can define file formats (defining how a few tens of things (different db columns) are taken from the columns of a tab-separated file) and then upload data to the database. Uploading, parsing and adding a ~10 MB file with 50000 lines (typical numbers, really) takes on the order of a few minutes. If I did it in C, the bottleneck would be the database and it would probably take 10 seconds or so instead.
In fact, I've resorted to running small C programs from PHP in some places just because PHP is too slow at that sort of thing. Serves me right for using the wrong tool for the job. And yet I'm pretty sure I've saved a lot of development time by choosing PHP over the alternatives (which mostly involved learning new stuff first) for that project.
This signature is not in the public domain.
tone it down asshole, everybody makes mistakes (your mother made one when she made you)
If its a release candidate and "stable", shouldn't the testing already be done?
The upcoming release of PHP5 will create a wave of comparisons to Java. When that happens, remember that it isn't a zero sum game. The two languages work reasonably well side by side. There will come a point when the industry pundit ashclowns start repeating what you're about to read to the enterprise upper echelons. When that happens, it will get really interesting.
PHP has two primary strengths: architecture and standards. The majority of java webspace applications were written before css and xhtml were mainstream. I predict that there will be a need for css and xhtml conversions among the big java web apps and this will be readily delegated to PHP. PHP handles "the presentation layer" meaning the application layer that actually integrates what's necessary for your browser to present a nice page (cross-platform, cross-browser) better than any tool out there. That's why Sun wanted to partner with PHP-creator-company Zend.
So architecture-wise, PHP is at the heart of the presentation layer. Standards-wise, PHP will help to bring about what CSS and XHTML promise.
Oracle is aware of PHP, IBM is aware of PHP, Macromedia is aware of PHP. Now the hiring managers get to start looking for PHP coders.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Having browsed only a few ASP.NET howtos but not having had the opportunity (or misery -- since this IS slashdot) to code in it, I'm not too familiar with ASP.NET
OTOH, I am a bit more involved in programming in PHP. I think it's fairly nice and simple enough. Haven't gotten into a lot of the OO stuff but it's still fairly powerful with the simple things I do.
From what I've read, ASP.NET abstracts a LOT of the stuff from the programmer. Forms pretty much take care of themselves, validate on their own, and repopulate themselves for the user to correct. Among other things, this helps isolate code from content.
From experience (which may be very limited), PHP doesn't have this feature. This allows for so much more control over what happens to your forms, but also introduces more code into the mix which could get ugly after a while.
Thus we have control vs. abstraction -- a classic debate. Convenience and rapid development would lean towards abstraction (as anyone who coded VB may argue). Would be nice if PHP had that n00b convenience somewhere while still being great for more advanced coders.
Ultimately, control is probably the choice for anyone who wants to get past the abstraction. Besides, in the long run, you'd probably want to write your own data validation code (or at least implement an open-source version) instead of relying on a (closed-source) language to check for you. That's simply a matter of trust.
Yes, I've run php5 and php4 on the same box for almost a year. There are a handful of howto's for running two modules under apache, for examplea quickl Google gives me: www.schlitt.info/applications/blog/archives/83_How _to_run_PHP4_and_PHP_5_parallel.html
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
FOAD
For people who think there must be something better to write web-based applications than PHP, I invite you all to take a look at Seaside by Avi Bryant, a web framework available for Squeak and, I think, VisualWorks Smalltalk. It uses continuations to make programming a web application basically the same as coding a desktop application. It features many, many things that PHP cannot do.
For those of you who don't know PHP, just wait a version or two. It already supports VB, C, C++, Javascript and Perl style coding. Version 5 is basically Java. Expect Intercal, Unlambda, and BrainF*** support by version 7 or 8. If you know a Turing-complete language, chances are you'll be able to use it to code PHP by the end of the decade.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
how is the language working against it? perl development is as maintainable as the developers on a project make it.
with proper modularization, templating, and checking in of versions, it's not a problem.
It sounds like they basically have added all the syntax and OO features of Java. I'm not sure whether that's cool or what...
It is kind of handy, but I'm finding it hard to shifting my thinking to using php for full OO applications like one would do with servlets/JSP. PHP is certainly easier to code in than JSP, so I guess this is good.
What advantage does PHP have over Perl?
At first, I rejected PHP because of its (apparent) preference for intermingling presentation and logic. As has been thoroughly discussed in another thread, separating the two is not only possible but recommended. That doesn't give PHP any points though -- it just removes a penalty.
Both languages have a wide range of libraries/modules to choose from (although I think the score here goes to Perl). Their syntax is nearly identical. They both run on lots of different platforms. PHP is pegged as a tool for making web sites, while Perl is a general-purpose scripting language that happens to be useful for web sites too.
So, make a business case for me. I manage a development team (I rose from the ranks so save your MBA jokes for another day) and I want to know why I should consider PHP over Perl.
irb(main):001:0>
Don't use PHP 5.x yet for production. Wait until it's released (at least), or a few months after the initial release.
I have a webpage on how to build and use PHP with Apache 2.x at http://dan.drydog.com/apache2php.html 4.3.4
A test run of our PHP setup on PHP5 RC1 seems to be more responsive and crisp than it was on PHP4.
Riiight. "Crisp". Yeah, that sounds like a very analytical test run you did. Did you also notice PHP5's woody undertones and how it satisfies the spirit without weighing down the heart?
So does PHP5 have proper Unicode support, or are we still supposed to pretend that you can treat UTF8 as ASCII and that it will 'just work'?
I aggree with you, XML/XSLT/CSS is the best approach. Also use AxKit to get backward compability!!!
Hi, Anyone have thoughts on Cold Fusion vs php? Is it worthwhile to move from COld Fusion to PHP (other then Cold Fusion is dieing). Thanks!
Speed along is one thing. I used to use Perl and even compiled perl, until I tried PHP and was blown away by the speed-up of my apps. Perl is nice because of it's regular expressions and such... but PHP has all that and more.
Meh.
WebObjects was a similar type deal, only it had a graphical GUI builder. Programming web apps with WebObjects was pretty much identical to desktop apps, with the addition of some new objects for web based functionality. Objective-C is also quite similar to smalltalk. It was a really cool dev environment, unfortunately apple price it was out of reach for too long and never got around to actually trying to market it...
Why is this insightful?
Having been a big PHP fan, let me assure you that PHP has a strong central theme like a kleptomaniac with ADD has a strong attention span.
And does Perl have a 'strong central theme' ?
Note: I don't particularly like PHP nor Perl, but if there's any language that's built for everything and then some, it's Perl.
Having been a big PHP fan, every story about PHP releases reminds me of the page long list of vulnerabilities and issues under it's entry in netbsd's package listing.
There's a good reason why most sensible stable package trees don't release every latest-and-greatest version, and instead opt to patch vulnerabilities on current 'stable' versions.
So yes, while I don't like the whole inline system, I consider PHP pretty safe to use.
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
I'm mostly of that opinion as well. The author of bTemplate wrote an essay on using PHP as its own template engine. That said, I actually prefer to use Smarty since I do coding and design for our intranet. I've found it easier to switch hats when I have to switch syntax as well.
You got to be kidding.
PHP has two primary strengths: architecture and standards.
Java is a general purpose language build from the ground up as an OOP. Java is used from embedded systems, mobile phones, desktops, webapps to world class enterprise projects. Java has a sound definition as a language and its virtual machine. Java standards are defined by the JCP with formal methods for approving changes including Apache.
AFAIK PHP is used only in webapps. OOP was added as an afterthought. PHP is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.
Architecturally has native standard access to databases and there are drivers for every db, supports distributed transactions, has message queues, takes advantages of multiprocessors, JIT native compilers in the VM, libraries for every need. Don't know about PHP but for what I know Java has a more advanced architecture.
The majority of java webspace applications were written before css and xhtml were mainstream.
What apps are you talking about? The PHP changelog shows that PHP 4.0 was released in may 2000. The great mayority Java webapps are based on servlet API 2.2 or later which where release on april 2000. Please explain how Java apps are less suportive of css and xhtml than PHP. BTW, how many PHP 3.x webapps are there?
I predict that there will be a need for css and xhtml conversions among the big java web apps and this will be readily delegated to PHP.
If I would have a Java webapp that needs to support css and xhtml it would be ridiculous to rewrite the app in another language, when it could be easily adapted. How would I explain it to my customer? There's nothing in Java or PHP that prevents using css or xhtml or making them automatically supported.
I don't mean that PHP isn't useful, but Java has just a broader scope.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
If you're wanting to learn about all the wonderful new features in PHP5, then grab this book. It covers more advanced topics (hence the name Advanced PHP Programming) but it's an absolute must for serious PHP developers. If you're a beginner, learn PHP in general first, then grab that book.
Gabriel Ricard
What are you talking about? Java already has jsp (among other technologies) for presentation layer.
Have you ever stopped to wonder why Oracle 9iAS is a J2EE application server and not a php application server?
Where do you come up with this stuff?
All right, i have never used either, but would like someone to summarize what are these 3 languages about.
Perl syntax is obscure and complicated, php seems to be only used for small pages, and asp, well i haven't seen much people talk about it especially here, but i do see it getting used in big sites.
Also, there is jsp/servlets.
I am one of the guys that think that everything has it uses and that there are things in which a tool excels at. So can one explain me what would be a proper use for all these technologies?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
PHP has a smaller syntactical (is that a word?) footprint. As you said that you manage a development team, this is important. The Perl motto of "There's more than one way to do it" becomes an issue when you've got multiple developers working on the same codebase. You can write and (attempt to) enforce code style rules in your organization, which mitigates this a little bit, but it takes time to write those guidelines, get buy-in, and enforce.
I use perl often, but I consider it a "fire and forget" language. I use it for sysAdmin type work often, when I'm doing something once, and want to write a quick script that nobody (including me) will ever lay eyes on again. For real development, where I'm trying to create a maintainable piece of software, with input from other developers, I stick to PHP.
The thing i like about PHP is that it derives a lot from a lot of scripting and programming languages.
Wonder whats new about PHP5 though that will help the average web scripter....? The changelog doesnt show anything sensational.
Lord of the Binges.
The first version of PHP was written in Perl. PHP is an ASP/JSP-like Perl spinoff. PHP-like functionality is just one of the many things Perl does. Perl is the Mother of PHP.
Oh, Perl doesn't. But my PHP Lotus Notes client says neither does PHP...
w ww/php4/README.html has a good listing of the various remote code execution exploits over the years...] It's not about using bleeding edge code, it's that the stuff has been patched upon patched upon patched, and it's not worth the headache to keep patching the damned software.
Except PHP hasn't had an unexploited release in *3 major revisions* now to my knowledge. [ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/
Heh ... this scintillating commentary comes to us from someone whose site is hosted on Geocities.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
That's interesting because it's only insecure as you make it. If one loads any base package up with a dirty mix of extensions which are never utilized and put no real thought into the PHP installation...well, that leaves tons of room for problems. Any extensible language is at the whim of the packages beyond the host.
;)
Oh, and someone better let Yahoo in on this
I don't know, but possibly, The Kernel, occasionally known as Linux, works so well that we don't need Yet Another Case Of Open Source Effort Duplication (YACOOSED) (tm).
PHP could easily stand YACOOSED of being such. We need it about as bad as Groovy.
Thanks for fragmenting efforts, y'all. BeelzeBill loves you.
Yeah, that's my other website. Geocities doesn't support any server-side scripting at all, AFAIK. Fortunately, the one hosting togos.dhs.org also supports mod_perl, so I'm not completely screwed :)
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
I used to be a PHP developer, but switched to python-based content management systems due to the elegance and ease of programming in python. However, I was interested to see how PHP had progressed since the last version, and read the article linked by Slashdot.
The main reason I initially dumped PHP was its atrocious error handling. Python and other more elegant languages use exception handling, which is much more elegant than checking return codes and setting error handlers.
I had read earlier than PHP 5 would include exception handling, but wouldn't include the "finally" clause. For programmers that understand and use exceptions, the finally clause is _very_ useful. I try to avoid using C++ simply because it doesn't have a finally clause (and no, the object destruction mechanism is not a good substitute).
So, I became very excited when I read the following:
Note that there is support for "catch all" and for the "finally" clause.
(http://www.php.net/zend-engine-2.php)
However, I couldn't find any examples showing the "finally" clause or the "catch all" clause in use.
So, I went grepping through CVS.
In the changelog for PHP, it is suggested that all exceptions _must_ inherit from a base 'Exception' class, which means that catching and exception of type 'Exception' is a basic "catch all". However, I couldn't find _any_ evidence in CVS that a "finally" clause has been introduced in PHP 5.
Has anyone here found evidence that the "finally" clause exists in PHP 5?
Devin
Hell, just try porting a P/M site to a nice DB so you can push more of the data manipulation functionality to the DB layer where it belongs and you're in for a real tear-jerker. My main frustrations with OSS is that most of the work is done 1) where the work is easier, 2) where most people (unwashed masses) congregate, and 3) with little regard to lessons learned and best practices.
Yeah, right.
<?php echo '<b>great</b>'; ?>
<?php echo ' news!'; ?>
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
References work well enough. Show me where you've been constrained.
magic_quotes - you're totally right. Teh are the SuX. But it's not hard to work around. You just have some low-level test that checks the mq setting, and then conditionally addslashes() or not. It's not *that* hard. It's just one of those things you figure out when you realize that, for example, you're writing code that you're going to publish.
One apparently-little-used feature I've been wanting to play with lately is the PHP/Java integration. I've been assuming that PHP5 will be more conducive to this.
I've never QUITE managed to get this working on PHP 4 (though since I don't have any specific reason to use it other than 'I want to play with it', I haven't put all that much time into it, either.). Anybody tried this on PHP5 yet? Or know of a fairly thorough explanation of getting it installed and configured?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
More importantly, is it stable under Apache 2?
OK, I tried using XML & XSLT under PHP a couple years ago, for the CMS system which is linked in my .sig. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life.
/. will quickly point that out :)
Firstly, it required that PHP be recompiled with the Sablotron module, which would have made the software inaccessible to most of its current user base.
Secondly, writing the XSL stylesheets was complicated as hell. The learning curve associated with them would have made the software inaccessible to ~96% of its current user base, probably including me. (it now uses its own templating system which allows designers to create the templates.)
Has any of this changed? For example, are there any WYSIWYG editors which make it easier to write stylesheets? Will PHP 5 have XSLT capabilities built-in?
Or am I missing something? Is XSLT really not as hard to get started with as I think? (If I'm just a dumbass, I'm sure someone on
All the OO features are nice, but what's really missing in PHP are some critical "enteprise" features, like true connection pooling (and no, pconnect doesn't count).
The Raven
Death throes my ass. Have you seen the traffic on comp.lang.perl.misc? Have you seen the perlmonks website? Have you seen the journals and publications (both online and offline) that deal with Perl? Have you seen the new Perl books that come out every year? Have you checked out CPAN lately? It seems to keep on growing and growing... And let's not forget the Activestate folks (the main Win32 Perl distro) who still find it worthwhile to support Perl and sell related development tools. Yeah, none of this would happen if Perl was have "death throes".
If you like PHP, fine, use PHP. No need to lie or troll or act like a jackass.
I reported a showstopper bug two days ago that crashed Apache 2 hard.
It's been fixed now, but I don't see how they can go and say "Oh, it's really really getting there now" after bugs like that have been discovered so recently.
But PHP's development is odd to say the least. In the Betas alone, entire sections of functionality have been rewritten. From scratch. I mean, shit.
Don't get me wrong, PHP is a great language and PHP5 is a step in the right direction but the development of PHP seems, to me at least, so hell for leather.
I have never known anybody to use PHP to do sys admin stuff. Is it really commonly done? In not, why not?
You're both full of shit. And the moderators are on crack.
It's all about good coding practice. You can even write maintainable code in that nasty language people call PHP :)
Like I said though, to each his own. Some people worry that PHP is "killing" Perl, and other ridiculous nonsense... Frankly, there's more than enough room for both, and plenty more too.
I'm not religious though; if someone paid me to write PHP, I'd write PHP. But I won't touch VB though, that's the devil.
Heh, if you want to feel better about the language you have to use, just compare it to VB; "Well, at least I'm not writing this in VB..."
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I use both perl and php. My motto, choose the tool based on the job you need to do.
PHP in my mind works much much better than perl for web sites. The syntax is neater, its really easy to template a site in php.
That being said the scripts that I run to prep my photo library for the web run perl from the command line. Shell scripting is way too limiting and perl is fairly cross platform and php doesn't really work as a scripting language.
either way lots of comments in code make it better..
That's what I used to think.. then I tried writing a medium-sized app in Perl.
YOW!
Just having to deal with arrays v. array refs, undef v. empty arrays, perl's strong typing with numbers v. strings.. I nearly went insane.. the app was always on the verge of being impossible to understand.
I have since switched to PHP, written in a java-like style (objects, etc), and keep perl for the quick hacks.
Perl just doesn't scale, and PHP is getting better every day.
I see lots of people starting to grumble about Perl and moving to other languages.
I know this is only slightly related...but while looking at improvements with PHP, check out this powerful template engine written in PHP:
Smarty.php.net now at version 2.6.2 with improved cache ability.
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
Too bad lots of PHP/Mysql coders never heard about them. And if I had to make a site site fast, easy to maintain and with good code/presentation separation, I'd go with Java servlets and Apache Velocity. And probably some kind of framework too.
--Coder
The SOAP/Web Services support is pretty week, not well documented, hardly any examples.
Hopefully it will change soon.
PHP needs namespaces. Then it will be all grown up.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
I've coded java web applications for several years now, and I ENJOYED it. I personally HATE weak typed languages- maybe I could get used to them, but I make too many bugs that could be avoided by compilation/type checking that is lacking in PHP.
If you stay away from the 'advanced' j2ee stuff, like EJB and other crap, web applications are a breeze, and FAST. Personally, I prefer using templates (like Apache Velocity) to JSP. And noone in his right mind would make JSP-only web site. There are some web application frameworks that make job even easier.
By doing this this you get very good code/design serparation (cheap maintenance), all the advantages of OOD/OOP. And a strong typed language.
--Coder
I'll look at PHP again when its massive function library is refactored into functions.
There should be no need to write:
$arr = array();
array_push($arr, 42);
When it could be:
$arr = new Array;
$arr->push(42);
P.S. See you in Hell.
Is there any way to compile PHP to bytecode
or machine code?
Is there a way to distribute it in an executable format to someone's machine without an installed PHP compiler?
This would be for Mac and Windows.
See : Creating Extensions
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Huh? PHP doesn't enforce (X)HTML or CSS correctness. As far as PHP is concerned, all you have is a sequence of bytes. (Not even Unicode characters!!!) PHP spaghetti code is used for generating tag soup all over.
Also, PHP-driven sites usually don't use MVC but have an intertwined mess of presentation and app logic.
OTOH, non-JSP Java solutions such as XMLC actually enforce some stardard constraints.
And don't tell me to turn them off in my configuration file.
.htaccess . If that's also not an option, you can still turn them off with a PHP command that you could include at the beginning of every script.
Then turn them off in your
The fact there are many different templating engines for PHP nicely illustrates PHPs major weakness - it's become a sprawling, bloated mess of a language that has no properly defined standards and no clear structure.
Every time I look at the PHP manual there seems to be 20 new (inconstantly named) functions, 3 new beta libraries and 5 subtle changes to the syntax (that will bite you later on). Instead of having one clear set of standards that people can learn and adhere to you have dozens, making integrating other peoples' code a nightmare.
PHP is becoming like Windows - more and more functionality is being bolted on whilst trying to maintain backwards compatability and the end result is a complete mess. It needs re-thinking and re-writing from scratch.
With every release, PHP introduces incompatabilities with previous releases. I've written the same application three times - and counting. When has perl done something that brainless? PHP is a nice niche langauge - very useful for certain applications. Perl is generally much more useful and the development team doesn't keep shooting us all in the foot!
PHP is good enough for Yahoo, and they have more traffic than CNN does.
I think Yahoo! would object to being described as a small site. Devshed network runs on a slightly customised version of the Mambo Open Source CMS (PHP/MySQL).
While the new Zend engine does a very good job at being compliant to earlier specifications, the PHP guys have managed to make PHP5 incompatible to older versions - unnecessarily. The new version will introduce a lot of senseless errors and failures were previous versions mangaged to automatically convert varaible types as needed and expected.
So the lazy type evaluation seems to become history for PHP, as the new versions is out to get rid of its scripting language state.
and i guess its the old line: use the tool that fits the task best. perl is the swiss knife, php a more focused language for web apps. go for what you actually need.
sick of sigs... *sigh*
This is a common misconception among the people who use Perl only for quick hacks. I personally moved to Perl after using PHP for 4 years mainly because it became difficult to use as the projects grew.
Perl has a lot of tools to help you deal with project complexity. Various "strict" and "warnings" pragmas help to fight sloppy code, *plethora* of usefull development support modules, great testing frameworks, embedded documentation standard, etc.
PHP's best quality is simplicity, and therefore fast learning curve. And that's a big win for a beginner or occasional programmer. But larger stuff isn't done by those.
"With PHP, I can make anybody who learned the basics fo C and make them productive in about 48 hours, working on someone else's code"
Oh, please. People without substantial experience in software development don't get to work on large projects. If they do at your place, you're having an HR problem. The kind of code people with "basics of C" and 48-hour training tend to produce has no place in any system of even a moderate size and complexity. Unless you're talking about 100th PHPNuke clone done by school boys for kicks.
I hate magic quotes.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.