An Early Look At What's Coming In PHP V6

IndioMan writes "In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions." Update — May 7th at 16:47 GMT by SS: IBM seems to have removed the article linked in the summary. Here's a different yet related article about the future of PHP, but it's a year old.

Comments

Time to pay the piper...

[Onyma]

I am definitely no PHP expert so perhaps I am wrong but it seems that much of what is being changed is backtracking due to bad language decisions from the beginning. Sadly I think PHP developers with legacy code are going to be paying the price for several versions to come.

Re:Time to pay the piper...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not far off track. A lot of PHP's problems stems from the fact that the language itself was more or less kind of thrown together rather than planned out (from the early simple Personal Home Page scripting stuff to PHP3 that just kept extending things and adding more functionality bolted on). They only just began to start to stabalize some of that in PHP4 and really only started to fix a lot of issues in PHP5 and now PHP6. They are making good strides but there's a lot of work to do (and a lot of backwards compatible considerations, I'm sure).

The good news for PHP developers with legacy code is that they've had a long time to fix things. Stuff that is going away has been deprecated for many versions now so none of this should be a surprise. The people that will get hit are the site administrators using PHP based apps that haven't been updated in forever.

Re:So...

[77Punker]

Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.

Hopefully this will include cleaning up the argument lists of the string and array functions so that they hall take f($needle, $haystack) in a consistent order. Fixing the argument lists isn't in TFA, but it's a really obvious place to start.

At work, it may give me an excuse to rewrite a horrible old app that's been holding us back since the days of PHP4. I suspect I am not alone in wanting to see some old (buggy, slow, insecure, poorly designed) PHP apps get ruined so that they can be redeveloped now that PHP5 is actually a decent language.

question:

[larry bagina]

are these ass clowns still planning on using \ for namespaces?

A likely story

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, PHP 6 is probably a long way off. End of 2009 at the very earliest. Consider this: PHP 5.3 introduced RC1 in March with the idea of 1-2 week intervals, and, here in May, we're still not at RC2.

Given that PHP 6 was "rumored" to be out at least a year ago. I can't decide if the title "An Early Look" is meant to be ironic, or is just a sad indicator of progress.

Despite that, I would say that three things have recently happened demonstrating the improvement in quality of PHP:

1. End of Life of PHP 4
2. Many important improvments in PHP 5.3
3. Unicode in PHP 6

I would say that (1) and (2) easily are more important for the language than is (3). PHP 5.3's improvements should be a huge change: Namespaces (I know there's a huge amount of hate for this implementation: get over it. It's going to be very useful), Closures / Lambda Functions, and Late Static Bindings in particular make it hard to wait so long for PHP 5.3.

So, stop talking about PHP 6! Lets get PHP 5.3 out.

Limited cleanup

[Just Some Guy]

clean-up of several functions

Does that include safe_quote_string_this_time_i_really_freaking_mean_it, or do_foo(needle, haystack) and foo_do(haystack, needle)? At least it gets namespaces after all this time, even if they're almost deliberately ugly.

One of these things is not like the OOthers

[Ukab the Great]

One of these things just doesn't belong

python:

myArray.append(myvalue)

ruby:

myArray.push(myvalue)

objective-c:

[myArray addObject: myvalue]

smalltalk:

myArray add: myvalue

PHP:

array_push($myarray, $myvalue)

Well wouldn't you know

[omuls are tasty]

In the finest tradition of PHP, they made Unicode behaviour dependent on a setting. Have these people learnt nothing from the past? magic_quotes anyone? Bleh. All languages have their warts, but the amount of bad design decisions in this one is just staggering.

Re:Well wouldn't you know

[VGPowerlord]

Stack Overflow has a question from last year titled Worst PHP practice found in your experience?. Earlier today, I submitted the answer whose summary is "The worst practice in PHP is having the language's behavior change based on a settings file."

Great minds think alike!

Re:Finally

[rho]

Ubiquity is a pretty compelling feature.

I mean, BeOS is pretty bitchin', but I'm not spending any of my time on developing applications for it.