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Changes In Store For PHP V6
An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.
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... for those too lazy to RTFA:
Additions:
Better Unicode support
Namespaces! (this is being backported to PHP 5.3)
SOAP and the XML Writer/Reader modules compiled in and enabled by default (also in PHP 5.3)
Removals:
magic_quotes, register_globals, register_long_arrays, safe_mode
ASP-style short tags ()
Freetype1/GD1 support
ereg (use of preg encouraged instead).
i am servicing around 350+ clients in a small fish web host. even at that small web host, there are a phletora of different scripts, programs that clients are using to conduct their everyday business, their estores, their livelihood. some of them are dependent and locked-in to the software they are using like a small business company that extensively uses ms products is locked into microsoft.
regardless, backwards compatibility is important for those people. for starters, these are the people who have chosen php as the platform to conduct their business on, making php a de facto dominant language for the web instead of being a small time web language that was used on web savvy, webmasters. the financial impact of this is going to be huge for them, to adopt to that many changes php dev group started to introduce in the span of 1 to 2 years. this is too much.
you gotta slow down. or you are going to alienate the small business community from using php with what you are doing. if you break a small estore owner's store script every 1.5 years for 'upgrading', the second time you do it they will jump the language ship.
do not start to become an elitist group out of touch with the people, increasingly caring for nifty programming issues rather than what would the users think.
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I've noticed that every single article here mentioning PHP is immediately tagged 'phpsucks'. I find PHP incredibly expressive and am always surprised by the incredible variety of libraries/modules/plugins to manipulate graphics, flash, pdfs, to support protocols like SOAP, JSON, etc.
Perhaps we need an article on 'why php sucks' ?
My biggest issue with new PHP changes is fact that the sheer size of the PHP libraries mean that these new features don't bubble through to the whole core.
For exmaple take the newish try / catch exception features. On first glance you think "finally I can write decent exception handling into my own code" - which is great for your own exceptions but too many of the core functions used by your code or by a framework you're using don't throw exceptions - they indicate an error codition in the function's result.
So now we're seeing loads of code out there by people trying to do things "The right way (tm)" but it's full of bugs as there's exception conditions being raised by core functions that don't get caught by the catch blocks.
The line from TFA that concerns me is "Much improved for PHP V6 is support for Unicode strings in many of the core functions"
Many? That will means developers will start using unicode only to find scattered lines of code throughout the app doesn't work as the core function it uses doesn't support unicode. The overhead of keeping track of which functions do and don't support unicode will be a nightmare.
Of course not! Since no one has been stupid enough to directly insert submitted strings into SQL before sending it to the server for at least 5 years now, this won't affect any modern code in the slightest.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?