PHP 4.3.0 Released

aftk2 writes "PHP.Net has just reported the release of PHP 4.3.0. The update sports a unified method of handling files and sockets, a bundled GD library (for working with images), and finalizes PHP's command line interface. For other information, check out the ChangeLog."

Best New Feature

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

Is the friendly error messages [php.net] , they point you back to the PHP Documentation [php.net]. Being a regular in #PHP IRC channels, this is going to save me a lot of headaches :) Praise the lord, the newbies have fully automated RTFM messaging!!

XML?

[King of the World]

One of the problems I'm having is that there's no way in the standard PHP build to deal with XML. I either have to treat it as a string and write regular expressions (which, as anyone who knows the regexp xml problem, isn't reliable) or build my own with some external xml library, meaning that as I want to allow others to use my code I have to get each user to recompile too (which is like asking people to recompile their kernel, some will do it, some won't, and there's _usually_ no good reason why it had to happen in the first place).

Does this release change what's bundled in the base XML support? They mention function call changes but usually those functions are useless without a recompile.

PHP is still mostly a web page language. XML support should be just bread and butter to it. I need it to deal with RSS or RDF. I need it to deal with user input (if I want to do XHTML I don't want a user typing posts that are malformed - right now I have no way of knowing that).

//

Php has strip_tags() which, naturally, strips tags from a string. But as there's little functional difference between tags and attributes it seems strange that I'm unable to strip attributes with as easy a syntax (yes, I have to use regexps again).

//

I hope this doesn't sound too down on PHP. It's a good language. It's just not a great language like Java or .NET (lets face it, OO in PHP isn't great, and that's what most people have been waiting on PHP 4.3 to fix)

Still no non-experimental Apache2 support? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apache2 has been out for what, almost a year? And we still have no REAL support for Apache2 other than as a CGI? What is going on in the minds of the PHP developers? This is absolutely terrible.

Mandatory ISR joke: In Soviet Russia, PHP 4.3.0 launches YOU.

Re:consider running an opcode cache

[MmmmAqua]

Why no official PHP Opcode cache [weblogs.com]? 30-200% performance gain

Simply asked, simply answered: there is no "official" PHP opcode caching because PHP relies on the Zend engine and the PHP developers work very closely with the people at Zend, who sell the Zend Performance Suite [zend.com] (formerly Zend Accelerator), and the guys at PHP are not about to cut into Zend's livelihood by bundling a product with PHP which makes the Zend product redundant.

Re:consider running an opcode cache

[glwtta]

Just compiling PHP scripts on every page hit.

Ok, lets see, in the same thread there is a post about PHP not having an XML parser of any kind (the author mentions having to use regexp, insane as that sounds), I am assuming that means there is no HTML parser (or an equivalent of HTML::TreeBuilder at that) either.

Call this "informative-flame" bait, but I am trying to figure out why people get upset when PHP isn't refered to as the greatest thing of all time. I personally haven't used it for a couple of years, so I don't know about many of these features.

What does PHP use in terms of a browser agent (a la LWP)? Is there really no support simple filebased db persistence? (by which I mean something along the lines of tieing a hash to BerkleyDB). How well does it hook into the other stages of the Apache request handling pipeline?

Oh and something I'm curious about (too lazy to look it up, I guess) what sort of exception handling does PHP have (ie it's equivalent of 'try {} catch {} finally {}')?

What sort of logging modules are available? (log4PHP?) I'd also be curious to know about how PHP's templating systems measure up, from someone who's had experience with this sort of thing...

Anyway, this is a troll, but I am curious about the answers to those.

Now If ENSIM would Get Off Their asses...

[tyrnight]

This is fine and dandy and all.. but for all of us Ensim users.. we are still stuck on outdated PHP and apache.. Ensim still relies on their own versions oh PHP and Apache.. THIS SUX..

*now watch the flames from under me* hehe

Re:That's great

[ajayrockrock]

The last time I asked about apache2 support on the #PHP IRC channel, someone told me that the apache2 api is still a moving target and that's why it's taking so long for php to be "stable" on apache2.

I can't wait to use Apache2 but I need PHP support to be stable before I can upgrade.

later,
ajay

Re:consider running an opcode cache

[Kunta Kinte]

Simply asked, simply answered: there is no "official" PHP opcode caching because PHP relies on the Zend engine and the PHP developers work very closely with the people at Zend, who sell the Zend Performance Suite

That's the main answer I'm hearing. But zend is very expensive.

Maybe there's a compromise. How about a modest PHP opcode cache that has only some of zend's features; ie. a little bit slower and more conservative than zends.

I appreciate the work the zend guys have done, trust me I do. But that's an important feature to leave out.

Re:Best New Feature

[netsharc]

Hehe, you say it right, PHP is nowadays too popular that every "I know Frontpage!" idiot has begun trying it.

Yes I'm an elitist. Leave computing to the real guys.

Re:PHP is INSECURE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as lame as me? It means, sir fuckwad, no matter how secure you're writing your application to pass security information (credit cards, passwords, etc.) between the web browser and the server, PHP is storing your session information in clear-text temporary files. If your server is compromised, or actually physically stolen from your offices, all that valuable customer information is there for the pickings.

I simply don't understand why the PHP developers haven't bothered to encrypt temporary session information. Even a grade school child wouldn't have let that oversight past their code reviews.