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PHP Programming

PHP 4.1.0 Released 37

Posted by michael from the hooked-on-php dept.
sirPaul writes: "PHP 4.1.0 is out @ php.net. "It includes highly improved performance, especially under Windows; A new, and more security-friendly way of accepting form variables; Output compression, and much, much more." Check out the changelog."
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PHP 4.1.0 Released More

PHP 4.1.0 Released

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  • Windows binaries! (Score:3)

    by Wonko42 ( 29194 ) <.ryan+slashdot. .at. .wonko.com.> on Tuesday December 11, 2001 @03:02PM (#2688339) Homepage
    All these wonderful Windows enhancements, and where are the Windows binaries? Woe is me! What's this "source" stuff?
    • Something to learn about open-source projects is that binaries for them do not necessarily come out right away. They have to build the program for various platforms and test each binary, which takes some time. You should compile from source, anyway. That'll guarantee it working :) Anyways, be patient they'll get binaries soon enough.
  • Looks like I might be able to sneak PHP in here now. I've been using it for my own web development projects for a few years now and all I can say is, it kicks ass. Congrats to the PHP crew!

    If you're trying to decide which direction to go in web development, take a real close look at PHP. It totally smokes .asp and can do virtually anything you can do with java, except for client side stuff like applets. It's extremely fast and pretty straight forward to learn. Can you tell I like it?

    • It's actually grown beyond just web development lately. I've taken to using it for minor system administration scripts from the command line - sort of a 'Perl Lite'.

      Also, PHP-GTK looks like a promising development for future client-side applications...

    • ASP vs. PHP (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      (quote) It totally smokes .asp (end quote)

      I have not tried the 4.1 yet, but 4 had these problems/annoyances:

      1. Session variables were more complex to use than ASP's

      2. Lack of a wrapper function makes name conflicts more likely for form vars, session vars, cookies, etc.

      3. Case sensitivity. I hate that.

      4. Semicolons

      5. No direct module-level vars

      6. Too many arrays needed to access
      mySQL.

      On the good side, it won't be totally overhauled like ASP will when that .NET crap comes.

  • New Input Arrays (Score:3, Interesting)

    by n-baxley ( 103975 ) <nate@NosPAm.baxleys.org> on Tuesday December 11, 2001 @03:36PM (#2688552) Homepage Journal
    The new input arrays sound like a great idea that is long overdue. Bravo to the PHP team for producing a well thought out implementation and still providing backward compatability.

    Now y'all can rip me apart for being positive in a /. post.

  • MS working on PHP?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavisNO@SPAMubasics.com> on Tuesday December 11, 2001 @04:26PM (#2688853) Homepage Journal
    I was really surprised to see this tidbit:

    We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows

    Not that I'm against MS making PHP faster on windows (the environment I run it in currently - XP, Apache, PHP), but you'd think that MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP.

    -Adam

    You shake and shake the ketchup bottle - first none comes, and then a lottle.
    • Something you may consider is that not EVERY Microsoft employee necessarily feels negatively
      towards Open Source stuff like PHP.

      For example, if they really want to help Mircrosoft, then indirectly this is a good move.
      By making the competition better, your department has to improve even more. So it is very likely
      that somebody from a non-ASP department at Microsoft may have done that to try to increase the
      quality of the ASP software they are forced to put out to compete with PHP.

      Sorry for opposing the common Anti-Microsoft ethos here on /., but it makes sense if you think about
      it. A little friendly between-department competition (well, maybe not friendly). I'm sure it happens
      at most corporations.

      • Re:MS working on PHP?? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by stienman ( 51024 )
        Actually, MS is internally very competitive. Apparently when faced with a choice between two competing technologies, Mr Gates often decided to wait awhile and see who produced better results. It can be very cut-throat.

        You can read more about this on other sites on the internet - I have a relative working there, but of course we never talk about stuff like that (as most MS employees are discouraged from talking about such things, and business and pleasure don't mix) so I have, at best, third hand knowledge, but it seems reasonable.

        -Adam

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        Indications - For temporary relief of 404 pages due to bad links.
        Directions -
        Compose email to the webmaster
        Apply description of page you came from and page you're attempting to load liberally over affected area.
        Warning - Do not use this product more than 7 times per day. If surfing and sore 404 problems do not improve in 7 days; if irritaion or pain persist or worsen; if rash or other symptoms appear consult your ISP.
        Do not exceed recommended dosage.
        If you have a history of allergy to computers, bad jokes or parodies, please consult with your ISP or local computer retailer before use.

        Micro Basics - all the goodness with 75% less fat!
        No animals were injured in the testing of this website. In fact, many of them wanted seconds.

    • Re:MS working on PHP?? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DrSkwid ( 118965 )
      maybe you don't get it but ASP means active server pages, PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages, another is VB Script, but perl, python, ruby, rebol are also included.

      ASP is simply the name Microsoft chooses to confuse the world with. The rest of the computing planet uses CGI as the acronym. By using ASP it FUDs people because then people think that Unix doesn't have ASP.

      So you see PHP isn't a competitor it's an ally. What MS want is NT/2k/XP deployment not vb script.

      Once deployed it's hard to change, even if you did think that p*'s cross platform nature was going to help you. Once your scripts become complex enough then 'MS only' stuff leeches in (pathnames for instance) and moving over becomes too much hassle and for what gain?

      XP, Apache, PHP -- spot the weakest link :)
      • PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages.

        Sorry, wrong. VBScript, Jscript, and to a lesser extent PerlScript are languages that have ASP 'hooks' - 'seamless' integration into the ASP environment. PHP is not one of those languages, unless something has DRASTICALLY changed, and I think we'd have seen a more specific announcement about that.

        PHP runs as an ISAPI module under Windows - hopefully it does NOW anyway. It was pretty flaky in the past. Hopefully this 4.1 release remedies a lot of that. A few core PHP people were invited to MS some time ago to discuss how to make the ISAPI version more stable. There were apparently many threading issues, and the PHP team didn't have much in the way of specific MS experience - not as much as the Unix experience the developers bring to the table.

        PHP is most definitely a competitor, as is perl. WHY would I tie myself to coding ONLY on windows (via VBscript, ASP, etc) if I can just as easily take that code and port it elsewhere? Same issue as Java - my PHP code will run without change on a unix server or a windows server. So it's most certainly a competitor, no doubt about that. Throw in the price tag for PHP/Perl/etc ($0) and it really *should* be scaring MS some. At least it probably rattles a few cages in certain departments there. :)
        • Throw in the price tag for PHP/Perl/etc ($0) and it really *should* be scaring MS some.

          Actually, If you're running on a Windows box, ASP is free with the included IIS. If you compare to PHP on a Linux box there is a price difference, but Apples to Apples (just to confuse things) PHP vs ASP is the same price on the Windows platform.
          • True - but it's not cross platform, which is what I was getting at. The "price" aspect was intended to be related more to the cross-platform quality, rather than standalone. PHP being cross-platform should be somewhat more threatening to ASP than something like CF, because of the price. Just a viewpoint, anyway. :)
      • PHP is just one of many languages one can use in Active Server Pages No, PHP runs in a separate space to the ASP stuff. AFAIK you can't use PHP as a plugin language in the same way you can with VBScript, JScript, PerlScript etc. PHP either runs as a CGI or in an ISAPI process. ASP is simply the name Microsoft chooses to confuse the world with. The rest of the computing planet uses CGI as the acronym. Not really. CGI scripts traditionally run in a separate process with the associated overhead of process setup and teardown for each request, while ASP pages run in-process with the web server. Similar to a language-independent mod_perl or the way PHP runs inside Apache. In my experience developing cross platform stuff in PHP is easy, you shouldn't have absolute pathnames running round in your code anyway (except in config sections), and PHP - like most scripting languages - is very tolerant about using forward slashes on Windows so relevant paths are fine too.
    • MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP

      MS derives no income from ASP. They do, however, derive income from the sale of NT/2k/XP/whatever. Anything that makes those platforms of more universal appeal makes them more money. Similarly, if they did charge for ASP, a sane business decision would be to make versions available for things besides MS operating systems. True, they don't sell Office for anything but Windows and MacOS, but that's probably a cost/benefit decision (as in "X dollars for a linux Office team would only make sense if revenue Y is greater than X" (probably X + required profit margin)).

      It isn't hard to predict what MS is going to do given a set of stimuli. However large they may be, whatever their corporate culture might be like internally, they're a business like any other (public traded) business (operating in a near or total monopoly).

    • Why the surprise? MS injected $250 million into the Perl/TCL area through ActiveState. Why not support PHP too? Perl is actually now a .Net language that fully integrates with the .Net IDE! PHP doesn't have the syntax flexibility to reach that level, but anything that MS can port from the Unix/Linux world is a plus for them. It makes it easier to swallow that world if you can run all of its software.
  • The announcement says "Highly improved performance in general .... Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows."

    This suggests that Unix/Linux performance is improved. Anybody have details on that? Performance metrics?
    • The changelog says they've made hash tables a lot faster; these are used for all types of arrays in PHP. This should make quite a bit of difference, but I couldn't see anyhthing else that was faster...

      (mostly bugfixes AFAICS)
  • I looked at a prerelease and didn't see anything about that, although I thought I recalled reading about "issues" with it previously.

  • Who is Brett Brewer (Score:2, Informative)

    by inerte ( 452992 )
    In case you were wondering who is Brett Brewer, named on the PHP changelog, I did a Google search [google.com], and found that he's Co-President and Chief Operating Officer [euniverse.com] of a company name EUniverse [euniverse.com].
  • I'm not a programmer. Just a musician who learned some PHP out of necessity for my website.

    Now I know PHP pretty damn well - and I'm getting to LOVE programming web-based applications.

    I've read about Python, and I'm starting to wonder - for those here who know Python - is there any reason to learn it? (Besides just curiosity or learning OOP.)

    Is there a lot Python can do that PHP can't?

    I don't mean in its methods ("PHP can't do real OOP!") - but in a practical sense.

    Should I just stick with PHP or is there a big reason to learn a whole new language?

    Thanks!
    • Dunno enough about Python to answer for certain. One of the other guys in the office used it quite a bit, and kept coming up against oddities in how it handled certain situations. Don't ask specifics right now, cause I don't know them. But I do know that we keep coming back to PHP and using it more and more. Yes, there are some things it can't do very well, but pretty much every language we've looked at has some deficiencies, either in terms of learning curve, or strange behaviours, or lack of support/acceptance, or whatever. PHP seems to satisfy the most needs, while having the fewest drawbacks, when talking about primarily/strictly web-based apps.

      Email me privately if you'd like to discuss this further. :)
    • Agreed with previous replier. PHP is about as good as it gets in terms of database-driven Web apps. And Python CGIs wouldn't perform as well as PHP scripts, except maybe with mod_python, which I know nothing about.

      I'd say learn python ONLY if you want to write standalone (non-web) apps or scripts, which it is quite good at. use the right tool for the job.

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