Future of PHP Revealed

Anonymous Coward writes "In an interview with linuxpower.org, the developers of PHP present hot facts on the future of PHP, the next major release PHP 4.0, the license change, and what window managers they use."
jimjag note: See the Apache section for info about the latest beta release of PHP 4.0.

Comments

BeOS PHP port

[arielb]

I wanted to point out that Eugenia Loli is offering up to $260 for PHP 4 on BeOS ($120 for the Xitami and $140 for the RobinHood add-on). More details at http://www.ukbug.org/ Scot Hacker is also offering $140 for porting PHP 4 for Robin Hood.

An addition to PHP I'd love to see

[CoughDropAddict]

I worked for a while on a web-based application, where we used ASP/IIS with MSSQL server on the backend. We would have loved to migrate to Apache/PHP, but the size of the existing codebase would have made a port too costly. I've heard of a number of other people in this same situation.

The ASP->PHP port would be much easier if PHP supported the ASP object model. This would allow for dumb parser/translators to be written (like asp2php) that could work nearly flawlessly, because arbitrary translations don't have to be hardcoded in. For example, instead of hunting down how to do a redirect in PHP (ie. writing the header manually: this took me a good 15 minutes to figure out), I can just type response.redirect().

If mindshare is what this project's after, I can't think of a better way than to get a horde of gracious ASP/IIS converts. The stability and performance boosts alone should be enough to convince all but the most devout Microsoft fanatics.

Re:An addition to PHP I'd love to see

[Frodo]

AFAIK, PHP4 supports DCOM - and DCOM is the main power of ASP. Besides that, all plain ASp objects, like Request, Responce, etc., can be easily translated into a set of PHP classes which do analogous functions.

Re:An addition to PHP I'd love to see

[Matts]

Maybe check out ASP on apache, there are several options. Joshua Chamas' Apache::ASP (perl, but same object model) compiles all your scripts only once so executition is relatively fast.

PHP4 is simply great !

[J-F Mammet]

I'm a long time PHP developper (since early PHP2) and I simply love this language since the beginning. Like they said in the interview, the syntax is really clear and simple so it's really easy for anyone to read someone else's code and start modifying it. Anybody tried reading the (outdated) slashdot source code lately ?

I really like perl for some of it's strenghts but unless you have a LOT of experience with it it's really hard to modify a big project written with it (from my own experience).

The C like syntax of PHP is really neat, well thought and emacs (vim also) works like a charm with it.

One of the biggest improvement of PHP4 is the speed, it's really impressive. I'm working on a rather complex site, and a single page took .4 seconds to generate with PHP3, and now only .17 seconds with PHP4. It will be even better when we will be able to preprocess the files (ala java). See http://www.zend.com for some benchmarks.

Lately a java module for PHP4 has landed in the cvs. At first I wondered why they did such a thing, but take a look at this code :

$InetAddress = new Java("java.net.InetAddress");
$localhost = $InetAddress->getByName("www.yahoo.com");
$addr = $localhost->hostAddress;

Basically it does a simple nslookup on www.yahoo.com, but uses a java class to do it. Isn't it amazingly easy to use ? Think about what you will be able to do with this extension ! And of course it can use a lot of JVM (Kaffe, IBM JDK 1.1.8 for linux, sun JDK 1.2.2 for NT and others).

Any serious web developper should give PHP4 beta2 or the soon to be released beta3 and experiment a bit with it. I can understand someone not liking it, but I certainly can't understand someone not liking it without at least trying to use it !

J-F Mammet
webmaster@softgallery.com

Re:Zope is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

quick guide to slashdot moderation:
"linux is better" -- redundant -1

"freebsd is better" -- flamebait -1 (unless accompanied by well reasoned argument, and at least acknowledging places where linux is better, like SMP, drivers, and scheduling latency and jitter, in which case Informative +1).

"WinNT is better" -- flamebait -1

"Win98 is better" -- no moderation, since people are laughing to hard to select from the list and click the button.

Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP

[Get Behind the Mule]

Commenting as a long-time Perl coder who likes a Perl a lot, but who has recently discovered PHP and likes it, too:

DBI is database interface independent
PHP not

Bingo. This IMO is the biggest problem that needs to be solved with PHP. It supports a wide variety of databases with APIs that are very similar in function, but they're all different. We do a lot of work with MySQL and Oracle around here, and with Perl/DBI you can often go from one to the other with no changes at all (except the connection string). It couldn't possibly be easier.

Something like DBI could probably be done in PHP. It would be an enormous advantage.

Great Perl Module (DBI, CGI, IRC, FTP, ...)
Few library un PHP [sic]

That's not true. The standard distribution in PHP has far more libraries than I'll ever need. To be sure, it's not nearly as big as CPAN, but as you pointed out, Perl is more general purpose than PHP. And note that you don't need something like the CGI.pm module (an HTML-generating library) in PHP. You're programming right into the HTML file anyway, that's the whole point.