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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."
Congrats to the PHP development team! PHP has long followed the KISS principle while still maintaining the Unix APIs that we've all learned to know and love. While it's not the best web scripting platform for all purposes, it is a free and flexible alternative for many, many dynamic webpage projects. It's only because of PHP that so many OSS web applications have been allowed to exist.
:-)
It was slow to catch and a lot of people didn't get it.
Ok, I'm with the slow-to-catch-on part, but what's this about people not getting it? The concept had to be one of the simplest ever designed. (Thus the reason why it's so common across web scripting languages.) Here is your HTML, here's a bit of Unix scripting langauge. Simple, see?
On a slightly different topic, one wishlist item that I would like to see in PHP is Abstract Database Access. It's not really a good thing to hard code your application to a specific database, especially if it's a redistributable application. (e.g. PHPBB) The ODBC calls sort of solve this, but they do require that ODBC is installed, properly configured, and compiled into your copy of PHP. (Does anyone know if any distros now have ODBC as a "standard" library?) This assumption can't be made for most OSS applications, so they tend to tell you to just use MySQL.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Seriously, honest question. What's not to get about a language? It's just another language with different options, styles, formats, and uses...
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
I have been an avid user of php, I have even made my own website using PHP. It is so good that big sites such as mine use it. For all serious developers, PHP is the best choice for all php programming.
Do you play with your Willy?
What is so exciting about it? I can't find a single situation where it is better to use PHP than other programming languages. Why would anyone love PHP?
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
You've done such a wonderful job that it's time you stop now and let something better take over :)
I tried PHP, but I didn't feel it gave me the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs I get from Java, JSPs & Servlets.
Not trolling, just saying I'm surprised that Java and Servlet hosting isn't as popular as PHP. I'm obviously missing some key point.
Sam
I've made my living for the past 3 years as an independent PHP developer. I don't care what anybody thinks of PHP, it makes me money to live.
Meh.
http://bbspot.com/News/2000/6/php_suspend.html
Technoli
Yes, that simple thing which is overused for learning and coding pratices. In the times when you are have to look for good perl manual, PHP manual from the very begining was perfect. That's it. And second best thing came when they added those comments for user experience.
:)
So, in any way, PHP is such thing which just works.
Congrats!
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
PHP/FI 1.0 wasn't really a scripting language, it was more like a big perl (or was it C?) script that would put some variables in a html page. Not really that useful but a nice idea. :)
I discovered and started using PHP by the time the first beta of PHP 2.0 had been released. What a pleasure this was to convert my old clunky C CGI scripts to PHP. No more compiling, no more mallocs. Weee
7 years (I think, maybe it's 6) later I'm still using PHP for everything at work, and I certainly don't plan to use anything else (not that I could if I wanted, rewriting everything would take a few years...).
Congrats to the PHP Team, and thanks !
Apparently, it was so slow to catch that it was posted a day late!
Or is this a dupe from yesterday?
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 it is obvious why PHP has become so popular:
1. It is very easy to learn
2. It is easy to use (unlike ASP.NET) and relatively simple
3. The syntax is derived from C and perl
4. It is free
Let's hope that in the future the PHP developers can come up with some ways to make the code produced by PHP developers more secure.
One of the huge problems with PHP is the massive number of XSS and SQL injection vulns present in code. Partially because PHP is used by beginners, but mainly because PHP does not help the developer write secure code. It's fast and easy to write, but allows you to shoot yourself in the foot. Just like C. See this paper on precise tainting for an example solution to the problems. It would break compatibility with most software written in PHP, but that's not neccessarily a bad thing when most of it is insecure trash.
Aha, I was looking for a worse language than PHP and I think we've found it. ColdFusion! How could I forget about that nugget of programming fools' gold ;-)
I would agree that PHP makes a decent web scripting language for basic tasks (polls, counter, guest book, a bit of remote inclusion), but I am horrified to see people actually using it for serious stuff like enterprise level systems. That sort of stuff makes the blood freeze. I feel really sorry for the corporations who get sucked into it.
I support the idea of database independence.
But it should be done by using standard SQL.
Unfortunately, that is not a losing battle, it is a lost battle.
The database vendors doesn't care about standard SQL.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I agree with the simple inconsistencies. What annoyts -- no, frustrates -- me most is that the functions that have a string and an array for an argument is that sometimes the array comes first, and sometimes the other argument comes first. I hate it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Here's to you, PHP, five golden manbabies of the goldest sort.
PHP is an abomination.
It was very clever and very handy when it was first developed, but there are many much better systems for building web pages available today.
Its object-oriented features are kludgy, its syntax is a throwback to C, and it in a realm where string handling is ubiquitous, it provides you with such great functions as strtok() and strncmp(). I mean come on, haven't we evolved just a bit past using the C standard library for string handling in our freaking web applications?
Personal Home Pages is fine for whipping up a quick data-driven website, but if you want to build a large application it's crap.
I was born clairvoyant and was writing PHP code in womb. BTW, if anyone wants I can give you a heads up on Linux 6.6.6 and Windows WTF. Those come out AFTER the apocolypse.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
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().
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
Lucky for you there is a centralized, annotated, comprehensive, searchable, accessable by web services manual and a centralized repository of standard classes.
People underestimate the power of those two things. CPAN is the number one reason why PERL is still so popular.
evil is as evil does
So here it is 2005, and I need to teach the "interactive" part of the graphic design curriculum to college- and graduate-level art students. Is PHP appropriate for this today?
In a semester, I'd like my students to learn some fundamentals of programming. Like, what a variable is.
I find that when "interactive" classes are taught in environments like Flash or Director, design students wind up cobbling together bits and pieces of things without really knowing how the pieces work, and then they get frustrated when the whole thing doesn't work. Plus the environment itself becomes confusing (there is really no logic to Flash). Therefore I'm thinking I'd like to go "back to basics" for a semester. Just as design students know a lot about how printing works, they should know how code works.
The Processing environment was designed for teaching-- a kind of simplified Java. But while its graphics support is sort of strong, it doesn't have great network connectivity, with the result that things you make in Processing tend to feel a bit self-contained, like science experiments.
Going the opposite way, what do people think about PHP as a teaching language? It has syntactic similarity to C or Java, for learning "if then" and whatnot, in a way which could be applicable to other languages later on; has a lot of functionality in the core language; and maybe unparalleled online documentation. There is no development environment to learn other than a text editor and SFTP. And even though the idea of your code running exclusively on a server might be confusing, I think there could also be value for design students to learn the difference between server and client since it's a fundamental relationship in a lot of graphic design problems.
Remember also that these are design students not comp sci students, which partially determines the kinds of programming issues these students need to be versed in.
Thoughts from about PHP as a teaching language for non-programmers?
mysql_escape_string is deprecated and should never be used in production code! The replacement is the hilariously named mysql_real_escape_string.
Your "not that hard" comment is rather amusing with this in mind.
The fact you are using a Computer Science degree to back up your argument is telling. A Software Engineering would be useful, maybe, but a CS degree does not demonstrate you learned to develop enterprise level applications as this is not a focus of CS, as has been discussed many times in the "Shall I get a CS degree?" Ask Slashdot threads.
I'm sure you are developing fine enterprise level PHP apps, but I can also crack open a Mac Mini with a fish slice. It doesn't demonstrate it's one of the best tools for the job, even if it does work. (This is why most low-level systems software is written in C, despite there being plenty of arguments that there's "nothing wrong" in using others.)
And, yes, you're right, it's elitism. I'm elitist to the point where I feel that using any sub-par tool that's not suited to the task is not a wise long-term strategy. But, well, thanks for expressing that in some situations it seems to work.
Database abstraction is a frustration of mine.
Say, for example a "real" DBA writes a shopping cart schema / application, using a "genuine" (ACID-compliant) DB, the scalability will be phenomenal; The speed will be incredible because much of the code will be handed TO the database -- not parsed and parsed and parsed away at the PHP/Java/whatever-script level.
Now, let's say a "wannabe" DBA writes a shopping cart schema / application using MySQL. Then to "help" the Postgres folks out, the DBA adds an abstration layer. Woo hoo!!! Useless... Essentially, I'm offered a way to drive a Ferari (Postgres) down the sidewalk, negotiating with pedestrians all day, as if I were traveling by skateboard (MySQL).
Unfortunately, the number of examples of the later are a dime a dozen. The number of examples of the former are near zero. Think about why you'd even WANT abstraction. In most real-world cases it's rather useless and undesireable.
Well, your anecdote of 2 ColdFusion sites that crashed doesn't really prove much.
I've been working with ColdFusion for about 5 years now. My sites don't crash- and I get 10-20 million hits per month. Not huge, but a pretty good number. (No...this is not the site that is in my sig...)
I *might* get 2 or 3 'unhandled exceptions' in a day. And those are always caused by search engines that are hitting templates with bad queries. It is interesting to see the queries they send, "hmm...why did they decide to make the usernumber 99A4 this time instead of 994" the error is caused because *I* foolishly forgot to put a val() function around the number in a query. So I fix it, and move on.
If the person running the server has half of a brain, their sites won't crash. I've used ColdFusion from version 3, on up to 7. And they always put in great new features and capabilities that other web programmers need to work hours to duplicate- but for ColdFusion it is a built-in function.
Yes, people have been making fun of it for years- and it reached a peak when FuckedCompany was complaining about it a lot. But there are so many good things about it a lot of people turn a blind eye to. Hell, the Verity engine itself is worth the entire package price. I can set up a searchable index of PDF, Word, Text, files in about 30 minutes. This is stuff that people want, and really appreciate.
No reason to lie.
I, too, have PHP to thank for a wonderful career. While I know that PHP is not the best language for the massive applications I've done, PHP developers are relatively easy to find and train. That is a major marketing factor for companies. Rails is great but how many (available!) workers are there? Very few. Same with Python. PHP can be very powerful when done right. The last major system I wrote with it included a call center (using the wonderful company Voxeo for hosting) that dropped right into the CRM and loan processing software. The current system includes a self-running tiered hosting system (Bind 9, Apache 2, PHP 5.1-dev, PGSQL 8); the daemons (written in PHP) detect server load and move sites accordingly to other slaves.
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!
I've been developing website backends in PHP for 3 years, and large enterprise-scale apps for the past 1 year. It's a common misconception that PHP isn't appropriate for large applications.
It's all in how you use it. Do you hack together a bunch of pages with isolated scripts talking to html forms and databases in an ad-hoc manner? Or did you start with a solid application design model from the start and follow through with time-tested methodologies?
PHP gets a bad rep because of the large number of inexperienced developers using it with poor results. I've developed full CRM and ERP apps with it including invoicing and ticketing systems that scale beautifully and are a dream to maintain. PHP is fast, free, and easy to use.
It's the responsibility of the developers to use more mature practices when developing large apps- and to recognize the fact that small site admin areas often evolve into larger apps. Plan and design!
http://phpweblogs.com/phpcake.jpg
:)
Yeah, we're a bit over the top for PHP. The whole company had cake and ice cream to celebrate.
creation science book
If anyone needs an easy installation of PHP on a windows platform, try EasyPHP. The site is all in french, but it's free and good. It automatically installs and integrates PHP, MySQL and an Apache server.
Personally, I've set up a lot of moodle sites (www.moodle.org) which is the best free LMS I've found.
Check it out if anyone is into e-learning or web based training.
(Make sure you have a fast server if you want to put a lot of students on it. The quiz modules are very useful, but they use an ungodly amout of resources if you're teaching a class of +30 students.)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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
Ten years and the == operator is still completely broken. Any hope of fixing it in the next ten?
Suppose A equals B, and also B equals C. Any reasonable person would expect that A equals C, right? Oh yeah?
Try explaining that to a first-time programmer.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?
Most of the functions in the PHP distribution are named after a function that does the same thing in the C library that PHP uses to implement the feature. PHP is designed so that if you're familiar with the C library that it is using, you can very easily get the hang of the PHP version.
This doesn't excuse some of the weirdnesses in the core library, though -- str_rot13 (and the other string functions with underscores in them) is clearly wrong, as the earliest string functions followed the standard C library naming conventions.
To address your other examples: isset() is an operator that looks syntactically like a function, and would have been named in this fashion to mirror the other such operators (sizeof(), unset()). is_object() et al are functions that were implemented independently of this, and at the time there was no conflict. I see no excuse for the php_uname/phpversion difference.
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!
I don't like to nitpick, but... those aren't all core functions. They're just functions that are distributed with the core, kind of like the applications that come with a Linux distribution. You can build a stripped down PHP without them, if you want.
2. session-handling
CGI::Session.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"you can use Perl's regular expressions in PHP."
Nope. You can't. Well, you can. Well, sortof. Sometimes. With some syntactical exceptions, and lots of thinking about escape sequences, and passing parameters a different way. And that's the gotcha. You start thinking it's going to be the same -- and it's not.
Tweet, tweet.