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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."
Zend refuses to add basic features such as a basic accelerator ( PHP scripts get recompiled on every request ). In fact, there was a rumor that Zend bought and killed http://sourceforge.net/projects/turck-mmcache/, the best accelerator out there because it competed with their commercial product.
I understand that money has to be made for development to continue, but that's no way to compete.
PHP server needs true session and application scope variables. File-based session variables it has right now means that any variable that's not serializable ( eg. file descriptor ) can not be saved in the session scope. This is a huge problem. It results in developers making countless round trips to their database to serialize data, and hence making PHP scripts more dependant on close/performant database in general. There was an mmap based solution being worked on, but haven't heard much about it lately.
Other web environments have had these features for years.
I'm guessing that that sought of restriction on the PHP server will continue until an alternative server is developed and begins to gain popularity.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I'd like to take this oppurtunity to complain about __autoload in PHP5. It is one functionality which I find tremendously inconvenient when coding something like APC . File inclusions were never supposed to be that dynamic, it ends up with different compilations of the same file for different places it is included in (apparently some are still fighting).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Some of us are trying to help the situation by educating PHP developers. For my part, I try to write articles (and make them available for free), give talks at conferences and user groups, and answer questions on mailing lists and forums.
There's also the PHP Security Consortium, the Zend Framework (which will hopefully include most things on my wishlist as well as solve other problems), and a new input filter extension.
As BP says, it's a start.
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It's true that PHP suffers from various naming conventions, but namespaces might me the answer.
For PHP 6.0, does anyone know if the core developers are thinking of moving most builtin libraries into namespaces? For instance:
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.oci-commit.p
could be placed in the "builtin\oci" namespace and
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.ocicommit.ph
could be placed in the "builtin\legacy\oci" namespace.
You could quickly convert all PHP5 to PHP6 simply by adding the line:
. . . import builtin\*;
to the top of every file to make all builtin functions global (the way they are in PHP5).
Apps written in PHP5 would still work without the import, but they'd get a warning (which could be switches off in the php.ini).
- IBM has spiffed up Cloudscape to be somewhat compatible to DB2, renamed it to Derby and is giving it away
- Oracle is giving away a mildly crippled version of its DB, I don't remember the exact circumstances
- ADABAS, also known as SAP DB, is now also FOSS
- Firebird, née Interbase, was freed years ago and is said to be working well and under active development. I don't know why so few people seem to like it.
- I believe I heard about SQL Server being "free" under some circumstances too, but I'm not sure.
So... many thanks to MySQL for being a forerunner in the "free DB" department, and more thanks to other, formerly proprietary-only vendors for making their products a little more accessible to the common man!When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
> For read-only, or even read-mostly, MySQL is blisteringly fast.
I think you mean that when doing lookups of a very small (less than 1%) set of data from a single table with simple queries that mysql understands the b-tree index in myisam or oracle's innodb is as fast as any other database. In the case of myisam maybe a little more, in the case of innodb maybe a little less.
I'm sure you don't mean that when selecting 10% of the data of a single table of the database (thereby unable to do b-tree lookups) and doing table scans instead that it is very fast at all. It might be competitive with postgresql, firebird, and sqllite there, but falls *completely* behind oracle, db2, informix, sqlbase, and now sql server when using partitioning. Or parallelism.
And you probably didn't mean that it was fast when handling complex queries. It's notoriously bad about handling them.
> On Linux, with a disk caching policy of "Never, ever commit anything unless you have to swap something
> from RAM, or are about to umount the file system" and enough RAM to cache the whole table file, MySQL writes
> almost as fast as it reads. OSes with more conservative policies, such as insisting to decache often and
> verifying before releasing the RAM, obviously won't be so fast {but who'll be laughing at who when the power
> comes back on?}.
Wouldn't this be better resolved through a storage adapter with 128 mbytes or more of battery-backed disk cache, and then turning on write-caching - and having your storage system handle it? In this scenario you are very unlikely to corrupt or lose data due to a power outage or crash.
And you had mentioned large files - what if you've got a 10 gbyte file? Doing lots of concurrent writing to it? This won't fit into memory, so now you're back to the writing-at-the-speed-of-a-snail speed.
> What is it with the MySQL bashers around here?
- too much hype
- company leadership that covered up missing *basic* features in the product for years insisting people don't need them anyway
- unsubstantiated claims (blisteringly fast) that end up being gross exaggerations at best
- most non-ansi implementation in the marketplace
- deliberately complex dual-licensing scheme that doesn't comply with GPL
- inability to handle even moderately complex queries
- absolutely bizarre exception handling issues (silent truncations, etc)
MySQL is a success story, but mostly a marketing success story. It started as a sql layer on top of flat files - not intended to be a database management system - just a file management system. And then people applied this tool to database management - without even the most basic of features (views, transactions, etc).
This isn't to say that people can't successfully use it for database management. Of course you can. You can also pull stumps with a ford explorer. It's just that the explorer wasn't really designed for pulling stumps, and a tractor does it *so* much better.