So I made two C components for PHP, almost 20 years ago now, and they are still part of standard PHP. Pushing C-stuff into PHP was comically trivial already 20 years ago, and more recent versions of PHP made it even easier. Some people do argue that PHP is a glue language that was built to absorb C libraries (I have heard Rasmus himself argue that, and it made a lot of sense at that time).
Usenet as a discussion forum is dead. Go elsewhere. If you absolutely must have Usenet as a discussion forum, run your own server. The bandwidth required is next to nothing - any small dedicated server carries the power and bandwidth to run a Usenet server that can easily make it to the top1000 in the server statistics for what remains of Usenet. If you absolutely must have Usenet as a file sharing medium, well, commercial offers for that exist.
"If you've forked a piece of software, and haven't contributed back up because it takes too much in the way of staffing, but you have enough staffing to maintain a forked project, then you're not looking at this right."
Exactly - most enterprises do not think this through properly. They do not adjust their processes to match the Open Source processes on the outside.
In the past ten years I have been working in multiple companies that have had businesses based on open source software. Very often these businesses not only used open source software, but also substantially modified it in order to adjust it to the needs of the enterprise, to make it scale or simply to fix bugs in code that otherwise has been rarely exercised.
In effect, this created a fork of the software, internally inside the enterprise.
These changes can be maintained inside the company, binding company ressources, or they can be put back upstream. Code can be part of what differentiates you from other companies, or it can be code that does stuff you do which others do as well - then it is infrastructure code to you. All infrastructure code inside your company you should share as open source quickly and reliably, because that not only improves the code but also shares your cost with others.
Very often companies do not do that - instead they are maintaining their fork of code internally, failing to integrate changes from the outside into their own fork, and binding valueable development ressources inside the enterprise in reproducing changes from the outside indepently. The reason for that is usually that there is an intellectual property regime which requires clearance of code before it can leave the company, but insufficient staffing for the actual clearance process.
As the enterprise slowly accumulates and integrates more and more open source projects to maintain their business they are slowly dragged down if they do not manage the process of giving changes back upstream properly.
It is not that easy - Postgres right now is lacking in the area of replication and thus fails as a database for all those MySQL users that require replication for scaleout.
Postgres replication options usually are active-passive (WAL shipping solutions that recover the slave) or are trigger-based and syncronos such as Slony-I.
What MySQL users usually require is replication to be losely coupled and asynchronous in order for it to become a viable scaleout option.
This spot by IBM was quite famous in Germany. One central quote 'And where are the web designers?' 'Snowboarding!' made it into the public consciousness and many people are actually calling their webdesigners colloquially 'Snowboarders'.
"If you want to work on your own schedule, you should be freelancing or consulting."
Which is why I am doing consulting. And every once in a while I end up in a gig where I cannot connect my own notebook to the company internal network, or where I cannot contact my companies online support because outgoing openvpn and ssh are restricted, and where I cannot contact my company email because a stupid security policy is forcing me on webmail instead of dimap.
Well, I am much less effective that way, but the price is just the same.
Why Internet Content Rating and Selection does not work
In April and May 1999 my wife and I were working with others on a study on controlling harmful and prohibited content on the Internet. The study favoured Internet Content Rating and Selection as the premier method of content control, but during our work on the study we found that ICR&S systems have a lot of fundamental problems which stem from the nature of the media and which make it impossible to create a useful ICR&S system.
- Internet Content Rating and Selection applies only to the Web - Labeling content that is not harmful nor prohibited is a requirement but cannot be enforced - Establishing a metric invites a dysfunction - Translating from one metric into another does not work - E-commerce and ICR&S are natural adversaries - Proxy-based ICR&S cannot work in an E-commerce enabled environment - Recipient-based ICR&S can only work in a cooperative setting - Third Party Rating cannot be based on URLs - Third Party Rating cannot keep up - Third Party Rating creates privacy issues - Third Party Rating has no standard complaints procedure - First Party Rating cannot be enforced - First Party Rating does not scale down the problem enough - Labels need to be tamperproof and tamperproof labels are expensive - Wildcard labels cannot be checksummed - Content rating cannot keep up with dynamic content creation - Dynamically creating content labels is expensive in current implementations - ICR&S systems may make error diagnosis more complicated and will decrease performance - False application - False positives destroy trust into ICR&S and into the Internet
Summary: The easiest way out for everybody is just to rate their website as "XXX" no matter what content is on there. That way you are on the save side of the law liability-wise, and if some kiddo cannot view your side, let that kid complain to their parents.
Now, what exactly is the penalty for overrating your site?
Enlightenment also has a file manager application called Evidence. Strong on metadata support, and with cool themes, evidence is specifically written to handle large or deeply nested directories. Have a look at the Pretty pictures.
The last time an oil producting county switched to billing oil in dollars, the US invaded that country under the ruse of "this is a rouge state producing WMDs". Now, four years later, the US government admitted that this was a ruse and there are no WMDs to be found anywhere in that particular country, but "it still was a good thing that we invaded that country to make the world a more peaceful place."
GROWIAN was installed in 1983, and shut down in 1986 due to material problems. It had a power output of 3MW, two rotor blades of ~50 meters each (23 tons per blade).
Wind energy generators installed by danish company in the north of germany now routinely have a power output of 2.5 MW each, and 5 MW are expected to become standard in two or three years time. The German Wind Energy Institute reported a newly installed capacity of 729MW between January 2004 and June 2004, a 13% decrease against the same period in the previous year. The total installed capacity came to 15327 MW in June 2004, 5% more than at the end of 2003.
Other highlights include a hiarchical tree structure to store entries and extensive standard schema for many object types.
And primary keys called "dn"s (distinguished names) that reflect the tree structure in a kind of path, so that when you move objects around in the tree, the dn changes. You'll have to change all other attributes that contain this dn as a value in order to keep the tree consistent. There are no mechanisms in LDAP that help you to do this, i.e. there are no constraints.
But that isn't really a problem, because you wouldn't want to use dn valued entries anyway - LDAPs query language has no join operation at all, so in order to resolve a mail alias object containing dn valued entries for the rhs of the mail alias, you'd be forced to program that resolution in a loop by hand on the client side. For each client supporting it.
In order to minimize dn volatility, you end up flattening your tree structure, for example by putting all users into the same level just below "ou=users,dc=example,dc=com". Which has the added benefit of making a lot of queries easier and faster. You know, LDAP has tree structures just like XML does, but the LDAP query language does not have axes the way XPath has. You would not have been able to leverage the tree structure in LDAP queries anyway. There is no way to formulate "find me all machine objects that have person objects at some level above them where the person is at management level" in term of the LDAP query language. It would be trivial in XPath.
And that is just before you start to think about missing bulk replication protocols, language variants of attribute values or the internal structure of Netscape aci attributes.
LDAP is the single worst designed database structure you can come across. It is not "not in normal form", it is the anti-normal, a complete deviation.
ACLs are just an attribute of the object. It's really very elegant.
Elegant is not the word I'd like to use for something that puts things into a permanent store that are not even in first normal form. You have aci records of the form
And I don't know what you mean by "delegation, emulation, posing". (Although I'm guessing _get, _set, and _call have to do with at least one of them.)
Delegation is a mechanism in the Objective-C Toolkit AppKit as it was sold with NeXTstep. It allows you to set a delegate object for any object. Method calls that cannot be handled by an object with a delegate have a chance to be handled by the delegate instead of the original object before a runtime error is being generated.
It was standing coding practice in NeXTstep to have a subclass of Application as your application, and implement many methods in application that would otherwise require subclassing of Window, Menu or other widget classes. Instead one used stock GUI classes and just set up the application instance as a delegate.
While that violated normalization principles preached by the C++ crowd, it also made many things easier, especially for little "I need to hack up a little GUI tool" projects.
In emulation, an object acts as a proxy for another object. Using introspection and the same mechanism as delegation you could code generic proxies that acted as whatever object you ordered them to stand in for. That allowed the creation of generic RPC proxy objects, which you called locally, but contained only the scaffolding and marshalling code needed to locate a matching implementation and to ship the call parameters and results.
Posing is a special case of emulation, where you subclass and upgrade a class, and then tell the subclass to replace the superclass, ideally system wide. There where subclasses of the NeXTstep image class that added some two dozen image file formats to Image, which patched themselves backwards into the system as drop-in replacements for Image. Any application that used Image instances or subclasses Image inherited the improved Image's capabilities and added formats.
But I do think if you're going to add support for a programming paradigm to your language, you should not design it in such a way that it's incredibly unintuitive and dangerous (thinking specifically of pass-by-copy here).
Have worked with PHP since the times of PHP/FI, I can tell you that this is not the PHP approach. PHP is the borg of programming languages. It just adds the technology of other languages to PHP and sees what comes out of it. The PHP release and development cycle will then adapt that.
PHP is not regular, and not beautiful. It is also not consistent.
As a programming language, PHP emodies the ideal of incremental improvement in as many way as possible:
PHP adds features in an incremental way.
It allows first time users to enter the realm of programming and takes them from "echo $PHP_SELF" to Templates, SQL and OOP in incremental steps that are no larger than can be learned in a single afternoon each.
And it adds new features and functions, or refines existing features and functions with each minor release.
Also, PHP took this paradigm and applied it to the PHP documentation, which is a funny cross of prinable book and WikiWiki - user input to the docs is slowly and incrementally being integrated into the main docs body.
So if Java is a consultant from IBM with suit and tie, and Python is an academic from the cs languages dept a european university, PHP is wearing an overall with oil stains on it and it has dirt in the face, but it somehow gets the job done.
I'd like to hear more about who designed the OO features of PHP 4, and who (re)designed them for PHP 5.
PHP 3 was a procedural language and designed as such. Rasmus made it that way, and when you look at the code for php.net, or other code Rasmus made or approved, you'll see that he has a case and a reason for all this.
PHP 3 had so called classes and objects, which were just a fancy syntax for hashes of values and functions, added as a midnight hack by Zeev and Andi to the language. Also, that hack was severely buggy. I ought to know, because I tried to use it in implementing PHPLIB at that time, and filed over 60 bug reports against PHP 3 during the six release candidates for it.
PHP 4 tried to extend PHP 3's object capabilities, but that extension was driven mostly by Zeev, who admittedly had little knowledge of or interest in OO. Also, he tried to model PHP 4's OO capabilities with the image of C++ in mind. During the PHP 4 lifecycle, I tried several times to nudge Zeev and the PHP community into the direction of Smalltalk and Objective-C, which provide an object model that is much better suited to a scripting language than C++'s model, and also is much more expressive, but my efforts were late and since I decided not to code to the Zend engine itself, somewhat fruitless.
Zend, especially Zeev, did do his homework for the version 5 release, though, and redesigned all things OO from ground up. He did so in front of a backdrop of PHP being used more and more in off-web usecases, that is, PHP 4 slowly becoming a mainstream language leaving its little specialized corner of web applications. Zeev's idea was to provide the version 5 release of the capabilities that are needed for PHP to become a real scripting language that can be used in larger projects, without breaking to much backward compatibility, and with keeping the dynamic "scripting" capabilities and feel of the language.
He succeeded superbly - PHP 5 provides the OO you need, and enables you to operate more within the mindset of a Smalltalk or Objective-C programmer than within the mindset of a Simular or C++ programmer. In PHP 5, objects are dynamically typed (class is a property of the object, not a property of the variable name), completely self-descriptive, and capable of delegation, emulation and posing.
Try it out and do not let the syntax deceive you - this is not a C++ or Java like language, try Smalltalk and ObjC for size.
That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
It is, and overdone OO framework is what makes PHP web applications slow. The faster PHP applications only use a limited amount of OO, and like you did, as a namespace management tool.
But PHP 5 is a base for more than mere web applications. The version 5 update readies PHP to leave the web application scope and makes it a fully blown scripting language. PHP is already being used in this context, albeit not yet fully recognized - most people still associate PHP with the web, like you did.
In the context of regular scripting, the capabilities of version 5 do make sense. They are in fact an enabler that allows proper management of larger and more complicated applications than what you see on the web.
In terms of OO-ness, PHP is more like Objective-C than it is like C++ - it is a dynamically typed language that allows for complete self-description of classes. This calls for a coding style that is more like Objective-C than C++, too - expect PHP frameworks to have larger classes and less deep class hierarchies than you are used in the C++ or Java worlds. Expect to see the use of delegation, and of the signal-slot paradigm.
Right now after the explosion of their main power plant would be a good time for the Federation to extend a hand towards the North Klingon empire and offer them a peace treaty. Send in Arnold and his crew.
"Google like" here means just "searching", but the result will in fact be more like WinFS than Google in that it is using file data and file metadata to index and find things. Interface-wise expect more quicksearch bars like the one in Kmail 1.7 (KDE 3.3.0, Till Adam) and JuK (Scott Wheeler).
What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.
Slashdot Mirror
So I made two C components for PHP, almost 20 years ago now, and they are still part of standard PHP. Pushing C-stuff into PHP was comically trivial already 20 years ago, and more recent versions of PHP made it even easier. Some people do argue that PHP is a glue language that was built to absorb C libraries (I have heard Rasmus himself argue that, and it made a lot of sense at that time).
Is everybody silly?
Usenet as a discussion forum is dead. Go elsewhere.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a discussion forum, run your own server. The bandwidth required is next to nothing - any small dedicated server carries the power and bandwidth to run a Usenet server that can easily make it to the top1000 in the server statistics for what remains of Usenet.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a file sharing medium, well, commercial offers for that exist.
MySQL has already been forked. The project is called Drizzle.
"If you've forked a piece of software, and haven't contributed back up because it takes too much in the way of staffing, but you have enough staffing to maintain a forked project, then you're not looking at this right."
Exactly - most enterprises do not think this through properly. They do not adjust their processes to match the Open Source processes on the outside.
This is now also http://mysqldump.azundris.com/archives/84-Open-Source-Leeches.html, a translation of a 2004 article from my german language blog.
In the past ten years I have been working in multiple companies that have had businesses based on open source software. Very often these businesses not only used open source software, but also substantially modified it in order to adjust it to the needs of the enterprise, to make it scale or simply to fix bugs in code that otherwise has been rarely exercised.
In effect, this created a fork of the software, internally inside the enterprise.
These changes can be maintained inside the company, binding company ressources, or they can be put back upstream. Code can be part of what differentiates you from other companies, or it can be code that does stuff you do which others do as well - then it is infrastructure code to you. All infrastructure code inside your company you should share as open source quickly and reliably, because that not only improves the code but also shares your cost with others.
Very often companies do not do that - instead they are maintaining their fork of code internally, failing to integrate changes from the outside into their own fork, and binding valueable development ressources inside the enterprise in reproducing changes from the outside indepently. The reason for that is usually that there is an intellectual property regime which requires clearance of code before it can leave the company, but insufficient staffing for the actual clearance process.
As the enterprise slowly accumulates and integrates more and more open source projects to maintain their business they are slowly dragged down if they do not manage the process of giving changes back upstream properly.
It is not that easy - Postgres right now is lacking in the area of replication and thus fails as a database for all those MySQL users that require replication for scaleout.
Postgres replication options usually are active-passive (WAL shipping solutions that recover the slave) or are trigger-based and syncronos such as Slony-I.
What MySQL users usually require is replication to be losely coupled and asynchronous in order for it to become a viable scaleout option.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLsPF6HkQ_M
This spot by IBM was quite famous in Germany. One central quote 'And where are the web designers?' 'Snowboarding!' made it into the public consciousness and many people are actually calling their webdesigners colloquially 'Snowboarders'.
"If you want to work on your own schedule, you should be freelancing or consulting."
Which is why I am doing consulting. And every once in a while I end up in a gig where I cannot connect my own notebook to the company internal network, or where I cannot contact my companies online support because outgoing openvpn and ssh are restricted, and where I cannot contact my company email because a stupid security policy is forcing me on webmail instead of dimap.
Well, I am much less effective that way, but the price is just the same.
http://kris.koehntopp.de/artikel/rating_does_not_w ork/
Why Internet Content Rating and Selection does not work
In April and May 1999 my wife and I were working with others on a study on controlling harmful and prohibited content on the Internet. The study favoured Internet Content Rating and Selection as the premier method of content control, but during our work on the study we found that ICR&S systems have a lot of fundamental problems which stem from the nature of the media and which make it impossible to create a useful ICR&S system.
- Internet Content Rating and Selection applies only to the Web
- Labeling content that is not harmful nor prohibited is a requirement but cannot be enforced
- Establishing a metric invites a dysfunction
- Translating from one metric into another does not work
- E-commerce and ICR&S are natural adversaries
- Proxy-based ICR&S cannot work in an E-commerce enabled environment
- Recipient-based ICR&S can only work in a cooperative setting
- Third Party Rating cannot be based on URLs
- Third Party Rating cannot keep up
- Third Party Rating creates privacy issues
- Third Party Rating has no standard complaints procedure
- First Party Rating cannot be enforced
- First Party Rating does not scale down the problem enough
- Labels need to be tamperproof and tamperproof labels are expensive
- Wildcard labels cannot be checksummed
- Content rating cannot keep up with dynamic content creation
- Dynamically creating content labels is expensive in current implementations
- ICR&S systems may make error diagnosis more complicated and will decrease performance
- False application
- False positives destroy trust into ICR&S and into the Internet
Summary: The easiest way out for everybody is just to rate their website as "XXX" no matter what content is on there. That way you are on the save side of the law liability-wise, and if some kiddo cannot view your side, let that kid complain to their parents.
Now, what exactly is the penalty for overrating your site?
Dismantle the system. Without powering it down. How many components can you remove, following all procedures, before the system becomes unavailable?
Enlightenment also has a file manager application called Evidence. Strong on metadata support, and with cool themes, evidence is specifically written to handle large or deeply nested directories. Have a look at the Pretty pictures.
Heise Newsticker is a major IT news site in germany. The linked article is in German, but you'll be able to read the stats.
The last time an oil producting county switched to billing oil in dollars, the US invaded that country under the ruse of "this is a rouge state producing WMDs". Now, four years later, the US government admitted that this was a ruse and there are no WMDs to be found anywhere in that particular country, but "it still was a good thing that we invaded that country to make the world a more peaceful place."
War is peace!
GROWIAN was installed in 1983, and shut down in 1986 due to material problems. It had a power output of 3MW, two rotor blades of ~50 meters each (23 tons per blade).
Wind energy generators installed by danish company in the north of germany now routinely have a power output of 2.5 MW each, and 5 MW are expected to become standard in two or three years time. The German Wind Energy Institute reported a newly installed capacity of 729MW between January 2004 and June 2004, a 13% decrease against the same period in the previous year. The total installed capacity came to 15327 MW in June 2004, 5% more than at the end of 2003.
Yes a Directory Server is a database.
A database that is not even in 1st normal form.
Other highlights include a hiarchical tree structure to store entries and extensive standard schema for many object types.
And primary keys called "dn"s (distinguished names) that reflect the tree structure in a kind of path, so that when you move objects around in the tree, the dn changes. You'll have to change all other attributes that contain this dn as a value in order to keep the tree consistent. There are no mechanisms in LDAP that help you to do this, i.e. there are no constraints.
But that isn't really a problem, because you wouldn't want to use dn valued entries anyway - LDAPs query language has no join operation at all, so in order to resolve a mail alias object containing dn valued entries for the rhs of the mail alias, you'd be forced to program that resolution in a loop by hand on the client side. For each client supporting it.
In order to minimize dn volatility, you end up flattening your tree structure, for example by putting all users into the same level just below "ou=users,dc=example,dc=com". Which has the added benefit of making a lot of queries easier and faster. You know, LDAP has tree structures just like XML does, but the LDAP query language does not have axes the way XPath has. You would not have been able to leverage the tree structure in LDAP queries anyway. There is no way to formulate "find me all machine objects that have person objects at some level above them where the person is at management level" in term of the LDAP query language. It would be trivial in XPath.
And that is just before you start to think about missing bulk replication protocols, language variants of attribute values or the internal structure of Netscape aci attributes.
LDAP is the single worst designed database structure you can come across. It is not "not in normal form", it is the anti-normal, a complete deviation.
ACLs are just an attribute of the object. It's really very elegant.
e phonenumber||mobile||pa
Elegant is not the word I'd like to use for something that puts things into a permanent store that are not even in first normal form. You have aci records of the form
aci: (targetattr="userPassword||sn||cn||givenname||tel
ger||title||description")(version 3.0; acl "self update options"; allow (all
) userdn="ldap:///self";)
Please give the LDAP query that lists all DNs that have aci's related to the user "nis-admin".
I know neither Ruby nor Python, so I can't tell.
And I don't know what you mean by "delegation, emulation, posing". (Although I'm guessing _get, _set, and _call have to do with at least one of them.)
Delegation is a mechanism in the Objective-C Toolkit AppKit as it was sold with NeXTstep. It allows you to set a delegate object for any object. Method calls that cannot be handled by an object with a delegate have a chance to be handled by the delegate instead of the original object before a runtime error is being generated.
It was standing coding practice in NeXTstep to have a subclass of Application as your application, and implement many methods in application that would otherwise require subclassing of Window, Menu or other widget classes. Instead one used stock GUI classes and just set up the application instance as a delegate.
While that violated normalization principles preached by the C++ crowd, it also made many things easier, especially for little "I need to hack up a little GUI tool" projects.
In emulation, an object acts as a proxy for another object. Using introspection and the same mechanism as delegation you could code generic proxies that acted as whatever object you ordered them to stand in for. That allowed the creation of generic RPC proxy objects, which you called locally, but contained only the scaffolding and marshalling code needed to locate a matching implementation and to ship the call parameters and results.
Posing is a special case of emulation, where you subclass and upgrade a class, and then tell the subclass to replace the superclass, ideally system wide. There where subclasses of the NeXTstep image class that added some two dozen image file formats to Image, which patched themselves backwards into the system as drop-in replacements for Image. Any application that used Image instances or subclasses Image inherited the improved Image's capabilities and added formats.
But I do think if you're going to add support for a programming paradigm to your language, you should not design it in such a way that it's incredibly unintuitive and dangerous (thinking specifically of pass-by-copy here).
Have worked with PHP since the times of PHP/FI, I can tell you that this is not the PHP approach. PHP is the borg of programming languages. It just adds the technology of other languages to PHP and sees what comes out of it. The PHP release and development cycle will then adapt that.
PHP is not regular, and not beautiful. It is also not consistent.
As a programming language, PHP emodies the ideal of incremental improvement in as many way as possible:
PHP adds features in an incremental way.
It allows first time users to enter the realm of programming and takes them from "echo $PHP_SELF" to Templates, SQL and OOP in incremental steps that are no larger than can be learned in a single afternoon each.
And it adds new features and functions, or refines existing features and functions with each minor release.
Also, PHP took this paradigm and applied it to the PHP documentation, which is a funny cross of prinable book and WikiWiki - user input to the docs is slowly and incrementally being integrated into the main docs body.
So if Java is a consultant from IBM with suit and tie, and Python is an academic from the cs languages dept a european university, PHP is wearing an overall with oil stains on it and it has dirt in the face, but it somehow gets the job done.
I know that PHP 5 is being positioned as more than a web language. I doubt it will succeed there.
For many people, earlier versions of PHP have been their first programming language. Wait to see them grow up - PHP grows with them.
I'd like to hear more about who designed the OO features of PHP 4, and who (re)designed them for PHP 5.
PHP 3 was a procedural language and designed as such. Rasmus made it that way, and when you look at the code for php.net, or other code Rasmus made or approved, you'll see that he has a case and a reason for all this.
PHP 3 had so called classes and objects, which were just a fancy syntax for hashes of values and functions, added as a midnight hack by Zeev and Andi to the language. Also, that hack was severely buggy. I ought to know, because I tried to use it in implementing PHPLIB at that time, and filed over 60 bug reports against PHP 3 during the six release candidates for it.
PHP 4 tried to extend PHP 3's object capabilities, but that extension was driven mostly by Zeev, who admittedly had little knowledge of or interest in OO. Also, he tried to model PHP 4's OO capabilities with the image of C++ in mind. During the PHP 4 lifecycle, I tried several times to nudge Zeev and the PHP community into the direction of Smalltalk and Objective-C, which provide an object model that is much better suited to a scripting language than C++'s model, and also is much more expressive, but my efforts were late and since I decided not to code to the Zend engine itself, somewhat fruitless.
Zend, especially Zeev, did do his homework for the version 5 release, though, and redesigned all things OO from ground up. He did so in front of a backdrop of PHP being used more and more in off-web usecases, that is, PHP 4 slowly becoming a mainstream language leaving its little specialized corner of web applications. Zeev's idea was to provide the version 5 release of the capabilities that are needed for PHP to become a real scripting language that can be used in larger projects, without breaking to much backward compatibility, and with keeping the dynamic "scripting" capabilities and feel of the language.
He succeeded superbly - PHP 5 provides the OO you need, and enables you to operate more within the mindset of a Smalltalk or Objective-C programmer than within the mindset of a Simular or C++ programmer. In PHP 5, objects are dynamically typed (class is a property of the object, not a property of the variable name), completely self-descriptive, and capable of delegation, emulation and posing.
Try it out and do not let the syntax deceive you - this is not a C++ or Java like language, try Smalltalk and ObjC for size.
That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
It is, and overdone OO framework is what makes PHP web applications slow. The faster PHP applications only use a limited amount of OO, and like you did, as a namespace management tool.
But PHP 5 is a base for more than mere web applications. The version 5 update readies PHP to leave the web application scope and makes it a fully blown scripting language. PHP is already being used in this context, albeit not yet fully recognized - most people still associate PHP with the web, like you did.
In the context of regular scripting, the capabilities of version 5 do make sense. They are in fact an enabler that allows proper management of larger and more complicated applications than what you see on the web.
In terms of OO-ness, PHP is more like Objective-C than it is like C++ - it is a dynamically typed language that allows for complete self-description of classes. This calls for a coding style that is more like Objective-C than C++, too - expect PHP frameworks to have larger classes and less deep class hierarchies than you are used in the C++ or Java worlds. Expect to see the use of delegation, and of the signal-slot paradigm.
Right now after the explosion of their main power plant would be a good time for the Federation to extend a hand towards the North Klingon empire and offer them a peace treaty. Send in Arnold and his crew.
The article in N&T is based on ideas by Scott Wheeler (and Till Adam, and Aaron Seigo and others). See Beyond Hierarchical Data: Search and Meta Data as Fundamental Interface Elements, Scotts lecture on query-based interfaces at aKademy.
"Google like" here means just "searching", but the result will in fact be more like WinFS than Google in that it is using file data and file metadata to index and find things. Interface-wise expect more quicksearch bars like the one in Kmail 1.7 (KDE 3.3.0, Till Adam) and JuK (Scott Wheeler).
See also a Blog entry of mine (german language) in the same vein.
There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.
What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.
So it is webmin, then?