PHP 5.2.0 Released 106
ShaunC writes "The PHP Group and Zend have released PHP 5.2.0, and upgrades are encouraged. The 5.2.0 update offers several security fixes, including patches for a couple recently announced buffer overflows in input parsing. This release also includes a number of library upgrades, bug fixes, and default bundling of the popular JSON extension to help with AJAX development. See the full changelog for more details."
Re:Oh look... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it has backwards compatibility issues. Most any upgrade path does. I personally deal with this by wrapping core functionality into a library. I've written sites that are insensitive to PHP versioning- they work equally well on PHP 3, 4 and 5. Programmers that require a specific PHP version 4.4.something should be ashamed of themselves.
There are a lot of good reasons to use PHP:
- PHP is very accessible, it is very easy to start working with
- Very stable
- it offers a ton of functionality right out of the box
- No need to buy extra components for trivial functionality such as reading binary files
- It's free (as in beer/speech), just like perl
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- the excellent documentation- which blows the competition out of the water.
Most likely, being this accessible causes it to attract quite a lot of not-so-experienced programmers. Which is probably the *real* problem. The main complaint I hear people make about PHP is that invariably, the sites built with it are a huge mess. Don't blame the language for that- blame its users.
Argh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment pisses me off, but there's something I want to say all the same: I think you are, essentially, right. Whatever one's woes with PHP might be, they don't justify trolling and unsubstantiated mouthing off. Besides, "toy language" is a purely inflammatory statement that doesn't even have any factual content.
However.
However, the implicit underlying assumption I think I perceive in your comment -- that PHP criticism must be trolling -- annoys me a lot. Please allow me to expand on this.
You see, one constant characteristic of the Internet in general is the noise. Look here on Slashdot: do you read all the comments on any given story?
The noise is a bigger problem than you'd think. The noise means that it's hard to get heard. It means that to be heard, unless you're a remarkable writer (which I, and most people, aren't), you have to exaggerate your message. "PHP is a toy language" is one such exaggeration; and perhaps even actually worthy of being modded up if followed with factual information to support it. And much likelier to catch a moderator's attention with its use of strong language.
Which you would, undoubtedly, consider a troll all the same, wouldn't you?
As you can probably guess by now, I have crates of such information against PHP. (In my defense, I do try hard to gather evidence against my own tools of choice as well, for two reasons. One, being aware of their own idiosyncrasies allows me to work better with them. Two, it's a simple matter of intellectual honesty.)
The vagaries of life have landed me into a managerial-ish position in a small company that develops and hosts large-scale PHP websites. My responsibility here is twofold: ensuring that the sites work, and ensuring that they keep working.
I didn't know PHP before joining this company; I had a generally positive opinion of it beforehand, from reading Slashdot. So I got to discover it through that new role.
Let us just say, to put it mildly, that my opinion of PHP has quickly become very poor.
I think that managing a language's design and development is one of those jobs that's freaking damn hard. It takes a LOT of experience, critical thinking, introspection, knowing to prioritize issues, knowing to tap into the decades of experience in language design to understand what works and what doesn't, why, and in what context. And different people with different backgrounds and objectives are more or less successful with it.
And I don't feel the people behind PHP -- I'm sorry, guys, I don't know how to put it nicely... -- are doing the best possible job of it.
More precisely, my primary issue with PHP is its culture as a project. Cultures are inherently difficult to describe, but if I had to put it in a few words, I'd call it the "Works for me" culture.
Simply put, the sort of attitude that PHP seems to encourage -- by which I mean, the shortest-path-to-arrival approach to doing most things in PHP -- work fine for the developper producing the code, but are formally broken in a way that WILL come back to bite the ass of whomever poor dude is in charge of keeping the thing working.
For instance: I understand PHP uses a function based on the tolower() C call to make method calls case insensitive, and leaves it at it. It works for them, doesn't it? Except that in the real world, it breaks. Deploying PHP sites on servers that use a Turkish locale yields blank pages. The workaround is to never use that particular locale. Easy, isn't it? No, it isn't: PHP's gettext functions for dynamic translation require the locale to be set appropriately (unlike that of other languages). And I have my Turkish clients on the phone a lot.
Until recently, before the introduction of PDO, the canonical native way of addressing databases was to use PHP functions named after the database itself (mysql_*, etc, making the process of migrating databases, or creating a site that may have to be deployed client-side on varying database backends, an utte
Mod Parent Up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Argh. (Score:3, Insightful)
(Actually, asking people what their preferred tools' most important drawbacks are is generally a good litmus test for their competence. If they can't tell you what the pitfalls are and how to work around them, or why they don't affect the task at hand, watch out.)
Simply, some tools are a better match than others for any given task.
For instance, I think that PHP makes for a good, simple and effective templating language.
But of course, there's a world of difference between 'HTML templating' and 'development, deployment and ongoing maintenance of a Web site or set of sites.'
And no, I'm not going to tell you what I personally favor for the tasks in question in this thread. That's not the point. What matters is not the tools I favor, but WHY I favor them. It is important that you figure out for yourself what makes for a suitable tool, from your own experience, because that's how you'll know how to make the best use of that tool, and what to watch for.
The next, much trickier step, is to figure out where your own blind spots are, and learn to take them into account when making your choices. (Mine, for instance, tend to involve underestimating the importance of community support -- a point where PHP, incidentally, scores high.)
I hope I'm not sounding too patronizing here (I'm not very good at finding the right tone in online forums). I'm no better than any other computer dude who's had to deal with a wide set of technologies and their respective fans. But I learnt what I did thanks to other people sharing their experience, and I can only hope that, by sharing my views on what I think really matters at heart, I can help others broaden their own experience. The first step toward learning, after all, is recognizing that there's stuff you need to learn.
Re:Perl vs PHP (Score:3, Insightful)
That been said, PHP has by far the largest set of available tools to help you do big projects of any web-oriented PL. Tons of commercial and/or OSS IDEs (PHPEclipse - especially the easyeclipse distribution - is awesome for a free tool), Debuggers, etc. It's pratically maried to MySQL (tons of tools aswell) and half of googles database is filled with PHP tutorials and forum threads on common PHP/MySQL gotchas.
If you want to do web stuff and unless you're in on some super complex parsing and data migration problem I'd strongly recommend PHP. If you're doing serial data-migration and plan on heavy use of Regular Expressions to solve your problem or have some other exotic procedural problem to solve that doesn't involve building a webapp, I'd suggest Perl over PHP.