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PHP 5.1.0 Released
kv9 writes "A new release of PHP5 is available. This version includes over 400 bugfixes, performance improvements over the 5.0.x branch, new date handling code, new versions of PCRE/SQLite/PEAR and over 30 new core/extension functions. A number of security fixes are also present and users are recommended to upgrade."
You don't have any classes named Date, do you? It's an extremely uncommon name. Good thing we have namespaces.
http://news.php.net/php.internals/20352
They are considering namespaces for PHP 6 - Read the meeting notes here:
P HP-6.html
http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html
http://www.corephp.co.uk/archives/19-Prepare-for-
I use to use PHP a lot day to day for several years (lamp), and found it kicked the ass of ASP for doing really fast web apps. Bigger web applications however, is where its mechanics started to erode - specically includes and the old module level variables issue.
.net and seems to be stuck between a scripting language and a fully fledged OO language.
PHP 5 brought more OO features but it's still loosely typed and not compiled, meaning its OO features pale in comparison to JSP and ASP.NET. Until these two features are added by default (yes I know there are compilers), I can't really see how people will want to make use of its OO features in a business scenario. It handles strings (atleast in 4) about 50x slower than
Nothing costs nothing
Can you just do an SQL dump from MySQL and put it into Postgre, no problems?
Actually, this can be tricky due to MySQL's tendencies to massage data to fit comfortably into tables. Using defaults such as 0000-00-00 in date fields instead of NULL, allowing values such as 2005-02-30 (i.e. 30th of February).
If you have such values in your MySQL database and intend to migrate that data into PostgreSQL, you first have to make the data conform to the C part of ACID (Consistency) before moving it to other RDBMS systems.
Unlike some of the other replies, I agree wholeheartedly. I am a Perl programmer, who actually has a clue about programming. (And I write legible Perl, thank you very much. [most of the time ;)])
I've just 'inherited' a PHP project, and I want to scream. I've finally had to 'learn my enemy.' So, wanting to know what the heck I was getting into, I bought a ton of O'Reilly books, and I read through a bunch of "Programming PHP" before beginning, so I wouldn't make the mistake of just slapping together whatever worked. Getting right into it, I was appalled at how poor the 'design' of the language is. It's a poor ripoff of many decent languages, slapped together in whatever Q&D way would 'make it work.' Why are phonetic string comparison functions part of the core language?! Those should be in a library! Why, oh why, was the scoping done so utterly backwards?! I was cleaning up some code, moving it into a function, and suddenly it stopped working. I had realized the answer the first time I tweaked it, but summarily forgot the second time around. What was it? Why, naturally, I had forgotten to do 'global $foo' inside my function - how stupid could I be to think code inside a function wouldn't pick up the contents of the variable as declared outside it?
*sigh* I've gotten a project with 15,600 lines of 'code,' and already gotten rid of 1200 lines of repetitive junk by applying some common sense to it. I have another 120 lines lined up to be shot today. (A diff -uw of 2 files turned up exactly 5 differences.)
PHP makes it way to easy for people without a clue to 'write code' that 'works.' Thank you all the same, but I prefer to keep my brain engaged in 'drive,' rather than 'park.'