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A Decade of PHP
digidave writes "It was slow to catch and a lot of people didn't get it. A lot of people still don't get it, but you can't argue with its success. June 8th, 2005 marks the tenth anniversary of PHP. Here's to ten more wonderful and exciting years."
there are several classes, including the PEAR DB class, that provide a DB abstraction layer.
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What the hell is PHP?
Probably a troll, but just in case anyone else doesn't know: PHP is a scripting language designed for generating dynamically created web pages. It functions by mixing its scripting in with the HTML, thus allowing programmers to reuse existing page designs. The scripting APIs are centered around those commonly used on Unix systems. PHP is usually bundled with Apache, so no installation tends to be required.
PHP Homepage
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Dude, you need to provide links. I had to *gasp* Google it! ;-)
:-)
For others, PEAR can be found here:
PEAR Class Repository
The Database classes of PEAR appear to be documented here:
Database Package
Looking over the DB classes, it looks like they provide a fairly decent abstraction. Thanks Quinto, that will definitely be nice for future PHP projects.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
PHP has long followed the KISS principle
Are you smoking crack? PHP is more inconsistent than any other language I've encountered. I'm not disrespecting the team, as I'm sure they've worked hard, and it's great to celebrate ten years of an admittedly very useful language, but PHP is not an inherently easy language.. it's just one that lets you code sloppily and get away with it.
For a start, PHP functions seem to have no consistency at all. Sometimes you get verb/object, sometimes object/verb. Sometimes you get underscores, sometimes you don't. Consider.. is_object but isset. str_rot13 but strpos. php_uname but phpversion. There are hundreds of these. It's the reason I could never learn PHP, it's like learning Chinese, but I found Perl (and now Ruby) easy due to their relative consistency. Sometimes PHP uses "to", sometimes it uses "2".. huh what's that about?
Unlike Perl which has a few regular expression constructions and a handful of modifiers.. PHP has a whole glut of regular expression functions which have confusing names, some of which take certain modifiers, and some that don't. As someone who has mastered Perl's regular expressions I find it a major struggle when I have to tackle something in PHP (I admit, I've never 'learned' PHP, but I find it a very hard language to make quick fixes on for other people.. compared to, say, C, VB or Python, languages I don't know intimately but can easily hack).
PHP has thousands of core functions.. nuts! And why does PHP have such a bizarre lack of abstraction? PHP often has about 10 functions compared to other languages' single function.. with each of the 10 doing a slightly different thing. When it comes to being overly wordy and inconsistent, I doubt anything can beat PHP, but, well, I'd like to see someone bring up a language that is!
So if you were going to call any language "KISS", it'd be Ruby or Python.. but PHP? No way.
I think the main reason is that OO is just not important when writing simple scripts that are taking information say from an HTML form and inputting into a database or some other simple yet highly used task. Most people that are using PHP on a shared hosting provider will probably not need to use any OO features. Now, the PEAR project for PHP does provide good abstraction for the language and I think makes PHP a much more usable system for higher end projects. I guess what I am trying to say is that for the common joe PHP is simple and gets the job done and if there is an easy way to do something normally people will flock to that solution. And I also think that PHP as of version 5 has become a much more mature option for even high end companies.
Go Illini!!!
Just a quick point--you can use Perl's regular expressions in PHP. And that's usually what I see people doing. As a matter of fact, it is recommended in the PHP documentation that Perl's regular expressions be used: Note: preg_match(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to ereg().
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I like PHP because it's basically a bastardised dialect of Perl, and I like Perl.
I like Perl because it uses different operators for string concatenation and addition. That doesn't sound like much of a reason, but a lot of the programming I'm doing seems to call for either adding numbers or concatenating strings.
Now, in some languages, strings and numbers are completely different types. Then it's sort-of OK to recycle an operator to mean something completely different, because the computer knows what you mean. But there are several dynamically-typed languages which use + to concatenate strings. Then the magic guesser gets its knickers in a twist with not being able to work out whether something is really a number or just a string that looks like a number. This causes problems when you try to add numbers and find yourself concatenating strings. I wasted the best part of a day on a stupid bit of JavaScript for a DHTML application with increment/decrement buttons.
In Perl {and in PHP}, 3 + 4 gives 7. "3" + 4 gives 7. 3 + "4" gives 7. And "3" + "4" gives 7. If you actually want to concatenate the 4 onto the end of the 3, you have to use the concatenation operator . instead of the addition operator +. 3 . 4 gives "34". "3" . 4 gives "34". 3 . "4" gives 34. And "3" . "4" gives "34". That is simple.
Perl is a bit of a 'mare for n00bs because everything is a shorthand representation. There is the wonderful $_ which avoids cluttering up your script with temporary variables. You don't need brackets round function arguments {like the British BASIC dialects of the '80s}. Everything is optimised for the hardcore hacker, not the beginner. It only looks pretty when you realise that simplicity is beauty.
PHP has a more consistent interface than Perl. So you can't just drop in a regular expression, you have to call a function with the regular expression inside a string. It also does more stuff automagically for you, like keeping hashes ordered {Perl doesn't bother, expecting you to keep a separate array if you really care} and dereferencing everything {Perl expects you to manually create and dereference references when you make multidimensional arrays}. So it's probably a bit slower running, but it's quicker to get an app up and running.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
ADOdb Site
I've never used PEAR, so I can't compare the two, but ADOdb is quite nice from my experience.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle