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!"

Comments

significant changes

[berkleyidiot]

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.

Re:Power Power Power

[Anonymous Crowhead]

It's in the design.

Yep. And if you inline presentation and data in a complicated web app, that's bad design.

Re:Power Power Power

[loginx]

Whoever said that PHP only uses inline HTML for the presentation layer is a tool.

There are several templating
engines available that effectively separate the application
layer and the presentation layer for PHP applications.
These engines are quite heavily used also (check the source code of most large
open source projects and commercial applications...)

Re:Here you go

[flocculent]

While I agree with the rest of your comments it's not really true to say that ASP/PHP/etc won't scale to the size of a site like cnn.com. They may not always be your best choice of language, but they do fit certain niches rather well. In general, for a website to scale well, the overall system/software design is much more important than choice of language/environment. (Though it's true that j2ee app servers give you a big headstart here)

Whether a website will scale to cnn like levels is dependent on quite a few factors... two of the main ones that come to mind are:

a) How much work the site has to do to build a page (think basic marketing website vs an online banking site)
b) Sensible overall design (both code and network/hardware).

A well built PHP site (i.e many servers load balanced, well cached page content, intelligently coded to scale from the outset) will scale to whatever you like, at least for cnn type content which is easily cached.

I worked on one of the very few major news websites that coped with Sept11th traffic, and that website was developed using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. (we only just coped mind you! ;)

I remember reading a while back that yahoo use PHP for various bits and pieces too..

Re:PHP Advocacy: presentation layer=application sp

[aled]

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.