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Advanced PHP Programming
Many of the previous generation of PHP books were fattened with lots of filler: how PHP imports form-submitted variables into its namespace, definitions and examples of valid XML documents, one-line summaries of every PHP function, even an HTML reference. It's like going to Gallagher's Steak House and filling up on free bread. Ladies and gentlemen, may I submit the Atkins-Friendly PHP book. This is not a book about syntax or data structures. This is a book on how to use PHP in enterprise environments. During my first read, I realized around page 126 that I had already learned as much as I had expected to learn and I was just getting started!
The book is very well written, with a friendly tone that is neither pedantic nor partisan. A knowledge of PHP before version 5 is assumed, and the situations tackled are very much from the real world. The focus goes beyond getting what you want to appear in the browser, too; scaling problems of very large web sites, managing a code base with multiple developers, and building your own extensions to PHP are all discussed.
The author draws most examples from a Unix + Apache + PHP environment, and MySQL is the primary database used. The examples are all in PHP5, but many ideas can still be implemented in PHP4. In other words, you can still learn a lot even if you're committed to PHP4 for the near future.
Part I of the book is called Implementation and Development Methodologies (some of these part and chapter names could be a little less clunky, even if they are correct), and the first chapter is about coding style. After that comes a thorough discussion of the new features of PHP5. These are language aspects that are commonplace in other object-oriented languages (e.g., java and python), but which I admittedly knew little about:
- encapsulation: the ability to keep object attributes and methods private or protected;
- static attributes and methods to make class functions or singletons;
- user-definable constructor, destructor, accessor, mutator, and copier functions;
- interfaces, which are like abstract classes. A class can implement one or more of these as well as extend a concrete class;
- exceptions, which allow propagation of errors and warnings back up through the function stack.
Other PHP programming concepts are discussed in this part, such as templating, using the command-line interface, and unit testing. The chapter on Managing the Development Environment includes some CVS basics as well as how to organize and keep separate your development and production environments without breaking what works. Another topic discussed is when to use PEAR classes and when to roll your own.
Part II, Caching, is where the book gets hard-core. Once your application works, how do you optimize its performance and scale it so you can have hundreds of thousands of users?
- You can use static variables to reduce recalculations, and compile your regexps.
- You can cache data on the PHP level in flat files, DBM files, shared memory, or even in user cookies.
- There are also solutions outside of the PHP userspace. The ordinary PHP process takes the text which constitutes the programmer's code and compiles into a assembly-style intermediate code. Then the intermediate code is executed. If a script is executed several times without change, the same intermediate code is created, executed, and thrown away several times. A compiler cache saves this intermediate code and reuses it. The author has developed a free, open-source compiler cache.
- There are also code optimizers, which eliminate dead code and overly-verbose constants.
- Reverse proxies also work in web sites to reduce network latency. Latency occurs when a server is stuck waiting for a request to be completed before it can execute. A reverse proxy server only collects requests, then hands them off on a high-speed network to the actual server.
- This can be made even better with content caching. The proxy can determine if the request requires handling by the PHP webserver at all. If a stale, cached copy suffices, it is served instead.
- Content compression sends your data over the internet compressed. The client's browser is in charge of decompression.
Part III, Distributed Applications, is of big importance to the developer of medium-sized sites. The author discusses the familiar topics of database interaction (including how to troubleshoot your slow queries), authentication, and session handling. Then a chapter on clustering: how to arrange multiple, redundant servers to create a robust, fail-safe system.
The final chapter in this part covers another hot topic: Web Services. Say you want to edit your weblog entries on a real text editor rather than through a web form. If you have RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) set up on your web server, you need only write a script which manufactures a request to a web service and and ships it out. What's the sales rank on Amazon of the book you just wrote? What's the weather like in Medford, Massachusetts today? These are all jobs for web services. XML-RPC and SOAP are approaching the standards state of usage, so using one of these means you don't have to develop your own RPC client or server library. SOAP is even richer than XML-RPC: it's an all-purpose messaging protocol which is in use by many of the big players in web services (e.g., Amazon, Google).
In Part IV, Performance, the author returns to the optimization question. How can PHP scripts themselves be made to run faster? There are several techniques:
- Use the apache benchmarker or other load-generating programs to determine which requests take the most time.
- Use a PHP profiler such as the one the author has written to examine your script line-by-line and determine which function calls are most expensive.
- Use a synthetic benchmarker (such as the one included in PEAR) to analyze small bits of code and discover how efficiently they do their task. Which is faster: interpolation of variables or string concatenation (the latter, at least before PHP 4.3)? If you don't have a library compiled into PHP, can you implement all the functions in userspace efficiently (not really)?
Part V, Extensibility, is for people who want to adapt PHP on the language level for their needs. This part requires a knowledge of C and a strong grip on your hat! After a discussion of PHP and Zend Engine (the virtual machine on which compiled PHP runs) internals, the author shows how to make both simple and complex extensions. You can add new functions to PHP, add a suite of library wrappers, add and manipulate classes and objects, all using pre-defined macros. In the last chapter, you can extend Zend itself to (say) implement all errors as exceptions, create a PHP Shell, an opcode-dumper, or modify the author's compiler cache or profiler.
I very much enjoyed the book. I have chosen to take the plunge into PHP5 for a new web project, partly because this book convinced me it's worth it. I can't imagine I'm going to use everything I've learned from the book, but I'm glad to know how problems like these are solved.
There are a few typos and misspellings, but that's to be expected in such a large book with limited turnaround time. Definitely recommended.
Matthew Leingang is a Preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. He continues to try to integrate web development into his day job. You can purchase Advanced PHP Programming: A practical guide to developing large-scale Web sites and applications to PHP5 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Part V, Extensibility, is for people who want to adapt PHP on the language level for their needs
This is an often-overlooked advantage in PHP: the ability to use php-embed to run embedded PHP within another application. For example, our company has created an HL7 HIPAA-accelerator in C/C++; we chose PHP as the embedded language in our product--by which users can create custom data transformations.
The reason? PHP is easy to use, loosely-typed (which is an advantage in our project), fast, and of course, free. It was a great decision.
Sigs cause cancer.
most of the books don't cover the topics of cli-based php which is unfourtunate.
Things like php-ncurses and php-gtk or even how to properly debug cli apps and it is strange saying there is a large following of PHP commandline (cli) people out there.
Anyway, always good to see more books at any rate.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
PHP 5? Great!
I've got a bit of a complaint about computer books, in that they frequently concentrate on the latest and greatest versions and brush aside the older versions - the versions that the majority of web hosts might be running, for instance.
I was looking for a MySQL book a while back, and there were dozens of them on the shelves in the bookshop, but all based around MySQL 4 - not the ubiquitous MySQL 3 that I was trying to learn. Looking through at all the new features can be a bit dispiriting, especially when you're stuck with the older version.
Anyone else had similar problems?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Sigh, I really wish these books would get with the times and start using PostgreSQL (or even Firebird) and Apache 2.x (I assume the book uses Apache 1.x since the PHP developers seem so against 2.x).
John Kerry is a Joke!
The early versions of Apache 2 really scared a lot of people away. It scared me away. Switched to Apache 1 and things started working again. Now that doesn't excuse my poor skill in the sysadmin realm, but I would doubt I am the only one who had headaches with 2.
-Phantom
I think we can add this title to the list of contradictory terms:
that onion article titiled "Student arrested for suspected use of PHP" ...and rightly so ;)
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
This seems to be a really common misconception among readers of slashdot. The truth is this:
- PHP developers are not opposed to Apache 2.x.
- PHP is stable on Apache 1.3 _AND_ 2.x.
- Apache 2.x has a large number of new features designed to better handle high volume sites (with or without PHP)
MySQL is still the standard web-hosting provider database backend, that is why most books cover it. mySQL is very similar to other SQL dialects. If you understand SQL, PostgreSQL is easy and you shouldn't need explanation on how to run queries from PHP. The books focus on PHP, not the SQL languages... if you want to learn about SQL, get a SQL book.
AC you are 100% correct but
Real programmers code in 0s and 1s
(Karma be damned! I am no better than an AC anyway)
- PHP developers are not opposed to Apache 2.x.
8 &c2coff=1&safe=off&selm=caonem%24rg7%241%40FreeBSD .csie.NCTU.edu.tw
At least one (Rasmus) is:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
John Kerry is a Joke!
Isn't that called "Perl?"
you should move to assembly, spend a week building a tcp stack and a web server that echoes HelloWorld to show the lazy scripting lazy users, who don't spend more than a minute for something like this, the coolness factor of doing everything on your own.
Except that the languages the Colonel mentioned don't make you do everything yourself. Perl's got the CPAN which has all sorts of goodies already created for you. Ruby's got the RAA and Python's got something similar.
I know that Ruby's got a webserver that comes with it: Webrick. You can create a webserver in 1 line of code. You can do similar things with Perl's Mason, too, I believe.
So, nobody's saying move to assembly language. If anything you should move in the opposite direction.
This book seems like a friendly addition to the many 100s of php books already out there. I have bought many php books and they all seem to go over the same thing, syntax and functions. But this book from the description seems to do more than simply explain functions and syntax but also usability and practical use. I am a php programmer myself and much of the problem of coding programs is high volumes of data and usage. By using a code cache system outlined in this book it would definatly allow many good programs that are out today to be used on a larger scale. I know a bulletin board I coded a year or two back could have used this, it choked at 1000 or so users at once. PHP5 is coming and it looks to me like a force to be reckoned with. While you naysayers who code perl, c, and other languages put down PHP as a pathetic language, PHP5 should be getting on par with perl and other languages.
-Rights? What rights?
I'm thrilled to death that PHP is finally starting to catch up with the rest of the world. A solid XML interface, SOAP support, and OO like behavoir are great steps toward a modern programming language. However after my experience in with the PHP 4 I won't be upgrading anytime soon. Can't deal with the constant configuration changes, changing function behavoirs, bugs, and generally moving target of a language.
Don't get me wrong I love the current state of PHP for developing small fast websites. But if history is a good teacher then PHP 5.3 will be the release which should have been called PHP 5.0. Good luck to those adventurous souls who will be running 5.0 on production servers. I hope you can tell me the dev community has grown up and stablized their dev cycle and that I can upgrade at 5.1 instead of 5.3
-- force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins ayn rand
mySQL is very similar to other SQL dialects.
Um, no. Not even close. Check out all mysql's gotcha's and deviations from SQL standards:
http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html
There are times when to use a strongly-typed, "true" OO language like Java or C++ and times to use a scripting language like PHP or Perl. Part of being a good programmer is being smart enough to use the right tool for the right job. If you want to torment yourself by over-engineering a small- or mid-sized website in EJB, go for it, but respect those who like being able to get stuff up quickly and easily, with a minimal learning curve. And YES, it is possible to build secure web apps in PHP, despite what you may have heard.
When you've only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Atkins-Approved? What the crap is that?!
(I know what it means, but what is it doing here?)
The Sacred Chao says, "MU".
The issue is not weather PERL or PHP or C is better than the other.
Languages are just tools. Writing good software is a reflection of one's ability to plan, use OOP, and troubleshoot code, just to name a few.
When faced with a problem that needs solved, you examine the problem, and select the most appropriate tool(language) to get the job done, and hopefully you apply good software writing skills to the solution.
Even if you think PERL or something is so much better than PHP, but you suck at writing good software, your software is going to suck.
PHP was originally developed to make web programming easier in the same way Bash makes certain operating system tasks easier. PHP:Web::Bash:OS. ... The problem is you can't have both Bash-like scriptablity and Java-like power/maintainability. So PHP will take the road of Visual Basic -> VB.NET.
PHP5 is impressive, but it appears to be trying to change its scope and here is why. Like Bash, PHP is a big time saver for small programs, but is more difficult to write and maintain as the program gets larger and more complex. The features added to PHP5 will let it scale better, but it will lose its Bash-like advantages. It is trying to move into the arena with Java, ASP.Net(?Maybe), Python, Ruby,
After seeing MY limits with PHP I moved to Python although I still use PHP for simple web scripts. In my opinion, PHP5 is a new language in an old arena. You should choose the right tool for the job, and if you need the new features in PHP, have a look at a powerful, weathered language like Java, Python, or Ruby, or (add your language here).
You ought to be using PEAR's DB class anyway, which abstracts away most of the differences in dialect.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Next in the series:
Advanced BASIC programming
If you have more trouble writing and maintaining large applications in PHP than in other languages, perhaps it is a design flaw in your project.
If you had started out with good design patterns in the first place you probably wouldn't have this problem.
I've worked on some pretty big projects in PHP, Perl, and Java, and I've seen all 3 done well, and all 3 done poorly.
I'm about 3 months into a ~5-6 month project in PHP. I had never done anything nearly as complicated as I am now, but I have done a lot of PHP programming. Mainly things that took 2 weeks or less.
:)
I bought this book near the beginning of my current adventure and I learned a lot from it. It's not the typical PHP book that just mirrors the php doc web site. There's a lot of great information in there. I'm still on PHP4 but that doesnt matter, the concepts still apply.
Thumbs up!
Joseph?
I am a sysadmin by profession, working at a mid-sized ISP in Toronto. I chose to be a sysadmin because I don't really enjoy programming -- but the nature of the job dictates that I code to improve efficiency or functionality. Recently I had to work on an in-house web application, and I chose to do it in PHP, but quickly found that the relatively small webapps I've worked on in the past were not much preparation, so I bought this book..
To borrow a phrase, "in a nutshell", this book is excellent! Some of it is beyond my skills at the moment, but I appreciate every bit. The author covers OO in a way that I understood, and presented real-world solutions that helped me understand. But, IMO, the best part isn't the PHP, it's the operational theory -- the real problems that sysadmins and web programmers face with large websites, caching, load-balancing, scalability. This made the book worth the $80CND I paid for it.
I highly recommend it!
-- Steve.
Or I'm just thouroughly confused.
PHP is *very* slow. You would be much better off using ruby or python or pike. Not only are they faster, but they are better suited to non-web apps.
> Apache 2.x has a large number of
> new features designed to better handle
> high volume sites (with or without PHP)
Yup. We run Apache 2.0 with mod_jk and mod_php on SemWebCentral;, no problems.
The Army reading list
I see a lot of posts making 'fun' of PHP/Apache/MySQL. Especially things like large scale applications, hard/difficult maintenance on larger projects and not good at scaling.
Well. That might be true.... For those few sites which actually DO require 'scalability', easy maintenance when the project get bigger and the target is millions of hits per hour/day for some really heavy computations and what-not.
But there are SO few of these projects around. So for all of you who thinks php stinks at least try to use the right tool for the right job. From my experience in web-application development in Norway almost every large software company will recommend some closed source, inhouse made, 'superheavy' application for whatever site you want to have. They will use every argument you post here to put their software in a better light than some 'light weight solution' like PHP/Apache/Linux/MySQL/postgresql.
Seriously, almost no web-sites in Norway targeted at norwegians will ever require 'large scale' solutions. There simply aren't enough people around. Still the companies will push forth their solution on unsuspecting customers.
I had a e-commerce site I made (using php/apache/mysql, python/perl for backend functionality running on TSLinux), reviewed by a respected IT-consultant company in Norway (Bekk - http://www.bekk.no/). Their conclusion was that it was a good solution, well written, but.... "It should have been made in a java/C# or something like that" Why? Because of scalability.
It's just absurd. They really don't take into account the target marked for the solution. And the current system setup is running just fine and dandy without any trouble. Should the number of visitors increase ten-fold (which it never will), well... Add some slave database servers and more webservers.
Suddenly you have the board of directors going: -Uhm, why didn't you write the system in Java. We hear Java is a good thing. Java is scalable. Java is more secure.
Why? Because it took me such a impossible short time to make the site with php and it's been going for 2 years now, without problems. That's why.
The solution they would have otherwise chosen would be 10-100 times more expensive, would require expensive servers and would probably take years to develop.
The profound weakness of F/OSS is that everyone thinks every itch worth scratching. I challenge someone to point to a single feature in PHP not implemented, possibly more cleanly, elsewhere.
I submit that, the next time there is a burning itch to create a Purely Half-assed Project, the would-be developer should, instead, go study some existing work and focus on improving it, instead of prolonging the reign of the Mephistophelially Smug. F/OSS will benefit from this restraint.
</troll>
I ran across a used copy of this book in The Strand and have to say it has taken its place next to The Cookbook on the shelf of Truly Useful Books. All the "advanced" php books I had found before this one either had a three or four page spread on objects and classes or (in the case of one awful Wrox book) scads of code with little useful description of the considerations that went into its architecture. If you're coming to php from a non-coding background, you'll find that most books seem to stop just before the discussion gets truly interesting (and useful). No, I don't already know how to make use of inheritance, and telling me that it involves extending a class without describing why I would want to do that and how to design classes so it can be done intelligently and powerfully is pretty useless.
This book deals with those advanced topics in substantial depth. Want to know what strategies should be considered in deciding how far to abstract database classes? Want an in depth discussion of preformance caching? Care to contemplate the values of various distributed architectures? Interested in Zend engine internals? From coding style clear through application benchmarking, this book covers it, and it covers it thoroughly and engagingly.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
remeber everyone, grahamg.org is powered by php... kickass!
uhhhh.... no php would be scripting not programming duh ;-P
OK, I'll byte. (1) Database access from a website. (2) Form manipulation. Name one other language or system where it's easier to dynamically create a set of html pages with data extracted from a database. Or a language where it's easier to get and use data from a form filled by the user.
How about "heterosexual artist"?
you are a ridiculous karma-whoring troll... this is not information, this is what Rasmus has been saying for a while because not all php extensions are thread safe yet. And Rasmus isn't even opposed to apache 2, he's opposed to people encountering an error with those non-thread safe php extensions. After all, Rasmus IS a core apache http server developer as well.
as PHP has grown more complex, it has continued to support and enhance the same basic tools that made it easy to use in the first place. what PHP is doing is making more advanced tools *available*, they're not making them necessary for use of the language. i would compare the maturation more to, say, QuickBasic which added functionality above BASIC while continuing to support its basics rather than the rehaul of Visual Basic into VB.NET
if i were to say PHP has had a change in scope, i would say that it is attempting to bridge basics to mid-level programming rather than leave the basics behind.
SQL Server 2000, what year is this?
r esql=free
On a more serious note,
PHP==free
Apache==free
MySql=free
Postg
IIS=!free
Oracle=>!free
SQL Server=!free
I use Apache 2 because it scales better and Postgres because I already know sql and don't want to spend half my life screaming because MySql doesn't support xyz abc etc...
Infact I try to avoid having MySql on anything, because I know that if i ever want to extract or archive my data it's going to be a pain.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Certainly, noone is opposed to Apache 2.x. It is a very good idea to make PHP work flawlessly with Apache 2, and once some certain technical problems gets corrected everything will be nice.
PHP is not stable with Apache 2. Rasmus Lerdorf's explanation is widely known, and is part of PHP's FAQ now. Basically, many extensions that PHP rely upon don't work well in threaded environments, and it's quite tricky to know exactly which ones and how to fix them (either on the library level or the PHP level).
Apache 2 was built to handle high volume sites differently, which happens to provide a huge performance boost on Win32 systems.
All in all, your message is kind of disappointing for someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
Even the simplest tools can be used to great effect. Likewise, the most sophisticated ones can be applied ineptly. I take advanced to mean "what you always wanted to do".
I think the most difficult decision is which tool/language should you use.
If you are a programmer it's always good to look around, see what this language can do, specially if better/faster than the current one.
When you have a software house this can be tricky. I've been doing some development from small sites to small applications and every now and then comes a question: should I change to java (jsp) ?
Seems that the EJB-something is a great thing but only pays if you have really big projects, otherwise you will end up having a complicated setup to do a simple thing.
You're a moron.
PHP is stable on Apache 2.x, using the Prefork MPM. Can't you read?
What features does PHP have which make it especially suited to form and database interfaces? Many languages have easy to use CGI/FCGI/Server API's; many have HTML-embedded versions and high quality template libraries; many have database libraries which easily rival and surpass those of PHP, and many have fancy dynamic form generation and processing libraries.
;)
PHP's far from best-of-class in any of these respects in my experience; only pervasiveness is in it's favour, and running my own servers, that isn't much of a conern to me.
Give me an example of how easy it is to interface a form with a database, complete with validation and listing using PHP in ways other languages can't match. In fact, show *anything* which you can do more cleanly in PHP than any other language, and you'll be on your way to having a decent response to the grandparent poster.. and me
Are there any proper Object-Relational database libraries for PHP yet? PEAR:DB, ADODB etc are all well and good, but they do little more than wrap the various PHP *sql*() functions and abstract away some minor database differences with various levels of success; I've not seen anything which I can point to a database, give it some hints on relationships, and have it generate the majority of my database interface code for me.
"Programming is the activity that involves a person writing instructions in a language closely related to the English language, in order to make a computer perform useful operations. These instructions collectively form a program, which is like a "recipe" for a computer, which it follows in order to perform useful operations. This program is then compiled by a compiler, into a form that the computer understands. This compiled program can then be run on a computer."
It is not programming because...?
(There used to be something clever here.)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672325616/ georgeschloss-20/
That link gives George a bit more money. If you're feeling really generous, visit his blog and click the little "Buy from amazon.com" button. He gets a larger percentage from those (ironically, more than he'll get from royalties).
OK, I'll byte. (1) Database access from a website. (2) Form manipulation. Name one other language or system where it's easier to dynamically create a set of html pages with data extracted from a database. Or a language where it's easier to get and use data from a form filled by the user.
Are you kidding ?
1) Java's db api is much more cleaner and database independent, You don't have to rewrite your function calls to switch the database implementation (e.g. moving from mysql to postgres and from postgres to oracle, in java you will only have to switch the string which chooses the db driver, in php you will have to rewrite all the code implementation that has [dbname]_connect, [dbname]_query etc. calls.). the same goes for perl. and python. imho this is seriously f_cked up in php, using the word 'clean' here is absolutely n00bish. and how to you update a blob from php ? (thinking SELECT bar FROM boo FOR UPDATE) ? it's simple, you just can't.
2) every proper MVC system has an implementation on DBForms which creates default forms from database structures without needing any kind of input in the code except the table name (input fields types & values are generated/validated/handled automatically). in php i have seen such features only in frameworks alike (php doesn't have any kind of dbforms implemented by default). so php doesn't really make anything "easier" here.
the worst in php in my experience is that i have to worry about how to get & feed my dates'n'times to the database, in java it's very simple, i always have one type of timestamp, no questions asked. in php i always have to be very aware of my DB behind the datamining cause it doesn't give me the same type of variables while asking them from mysql/postgres/oracle/sybase, if i want to compare the query result from different database types, i'll have to convert the timestamps in my code to compare them. this is pretty much absurd. at least for a "high level language".
so i can't really see how php is superior in any way.
it's backward compability is mostly zero. the dudes over zend just think that hey, let's make now php5 and break the whole OOP stuff that we had until now. (we're probably going to rewrite our 'framework' over here, to make it work again.
besides until there's no threading and variable sharing possibility, it's still far behind perl & python.
for a schoolboy, php might be cool. for a developer that has been working with code since 1990, it seems like an vegetable hamburger (sure it's edible at some times, but i prefer pizza,pasta or a proper meal with some meat in it.)
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Hmm - I'd have to say that using RXML's emit and tablify tags together is about the easiest way possible to quickly get data from a database into a decent looking form for an end user.
And considering that accessing a form value or a cookie is as easy as &form.varname; or &cookie.cookiename;, hooking cookies and form variables into the page is about as easy as it can get.
Are you actually that stupid, or is this a counter-troll?
I bought this book a couple of weeks ago. It's very good. I like the way it covers the general topic of "how to write applications well" as opposed to focusing purely on writing in PHP.
My only criticisms of the book are: (1) It would be nice to see more OO patterns stuff in there (particularly database access patterns), (2) There are a couple of mistakes in the code that got me puzzled for a while. On the whole though, an excellent read.
Seems to me that's a problem with PHP, not a problem with MySQL.
..for a loosely typed language. All of these features seem fairly useless without it having the speed of being compiled (there's compilers out there, but no built in one), especially as most php programmers use it for a quick and easy language. And those that don't end up with reams of spaghetti, even OO php. One plus is the access modifiers though
Nothing costs nothing
uh... i think i know what programming is and the definiation of it thank you very much; smartass.
Hmmm.
since were having fun with definiations now.....
Scripting languages are lightweight, easy-to-learn programming langauges which let you glue stuff together in novel and innovating ways without getting bogged down in the Turing Tarpit. Good examples are Perl, Tcl, Python and UserTalk.
(everything2)
and you're a homo
I agree that some applications are better off with Postgres but a half way decent abstraction layer and portable queries go a long way. I've changed some of my concurrent update intensive applications to a postgres back-end very easily.
Here is what is PHP4's OO model is capable of:
SiG
Jon Bardin
Just because it's a scripting language doesn't relieve one from commenting the code. Commenting out debugging/bogus code doesn't count, either.
This crap looks a lot like what a co-worker of mine produces. Why is commenting such a hard concept for so many people?
Now if only the PHP devs hadn't totally ignored Unicode support for PHP5, we might have had the perfect weblanguage.
Now you're still limited to ugly hacks and extensions that the typical PHP installation does not have, and the Americans/Brits are still unaware that there's anything beyond ASCII.
I know you are.
PHP may be a "scripting" language, however the act of using it IS programming. Why do you have to go to a lower level by calling me a smartass? It's really not that big of a deal.
(There used to be something clever here.)
oops, im used to flamewars over this kind of thing; sorry ;-P
Isn't that an oxomoron? Seriously, PHP and MySQL??? What's wrong with Perl and Postgres?!