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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."
MySQL support has been droped in favor of using simple flat text files. The performance increase from this has been HUGE and the feature set is the same.
> A number of security fixes are also present
I think we've finally found a replacement for the security disaster known as sendmail -- PHP.
My other car is first.
...and still no damn fucking namespaces.
Go PHP, ride on to the 20th century!
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Rails still isn't a language, it's a framework.
(calling Ruby a "toy language" when comparing it to PHP is hillarous though, thanks for the laugh)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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
I was under the impression that when using a x.y.z -versioning scheme, bug fixes should be released with increments of z, new features with increments of y, unless they break compatibility, when x should be increased. But when has even PHP done some something in a standard way.
"(...)and over 30 new core/extension functions."
Ugh. Adding still to the inconsistent, namespace mess, PHP functions have? Worst. Decision. Ever.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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 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
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
If you want cutting edge, then you'll most likely need to run your own server.
Serious hosting companies just can't risk running software that hasn't been widely tested. While there may be benefits from running the new versions of PHP, for instance, it could be a disaster if a security flaw leads to their servers being compromised. An incident like that could financially destroy a small- or medium-sized hosting company. At least the older versions of PHP have undergone more testing than the newer releases.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
- 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
Design and programming are two distinct disciplines. Some brilliant developers are good at both, but many people, myself included, get too much satisfaction from diving into coding to thoroughly think about what they are embarking on. The result is a program/system/language/whatever that starts with a clean small core but grows ever bigger and uglier as changes are bolted on. I tried PHP a couple years back and was disgusted by it. There's a reason why computer language design is a discipline of an academic subject, Computer Science: A wealth of knowledge has accumulated on how to do this kind of thing "right," and applying that knowledge will usually lead to a better end result.
Specifically, my beef with PHP summarizes down to: It makes simple things simple in a way that encourages sloppy coding. PHP is to the current would-be Web geek generation what BASIC was to teenage would-be hotshot coders in the late '80s: A way to achieve "gee whiz!" effects easily and cheaply. It's possible to write large, elegant programs in PHP, but that's not what usually happens.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
... still having no namespaces and lacking in full-blown OOP and all.
So what?
PHP is the web generations basic. No more. But no less either.
Given that loads of very usefull webapps out there are built in PHP
I'd say the criticisim is mostly inadequate whining. If PHP doesn't
cut it for your job, take something else. No big deal.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.'
Personally I think the use of the "global" keyword is something PHP got right and every other language (except ruby) got wrong. When you are reading a function it's good to know where all the variables are coming from. In ruby they use a sigil, in PHP they use a keyword, in every other language you have to search through the function to see where and if the variable was declared and deduce that it was either a global variable or a typo.
To recap. PHP got it right, perl got it wrong. You are annoyed because it's not the way you are used to working but that has nothing to do with the merits of the scoping rules.
evil is as evil does