Official Support For PHP 4 Ends 245
Da Massive writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued. ...With eight years of legacy code out there, it is likely that there are going to be a fairly large number of systems that will not migrate to PHP 5 in the near future, and a reasonable proportion of those that will not make the migration at all. For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP, noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product."
Good to see... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the way progress is made.
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Isn't that why there aren't any driver issues with vista?
Re:Good to see... (Score:4, Funny)
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I think it's the other way around - Microsoft has enough resources to support their products for 15+ years (and they have customers who request such level of support), while Zend does not.
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Yes. Business would keep old business model as long as possible. Changing infrastructure is something literally everybody avoids in corporations. That's why they are going to be stuck with M$ for some indefinite time.
But that's absolutely not problem with PHP (and open source in general). First is that you can always pay some 3rd party to do support for your. Second. F/LOSS in corporations has (at least in my experience) different usage pattern. While they would shoot dead anybody even suggesting to upd
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Re:Good to see... (Score:5, Funny)
Now if only they'd let the current version die too, we'd really be making progress..
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I am glad to see that the PHP community, particularly Stefan Esser, can continue to support the system even after the vendor stops....unlike Microsoft, which seems determined to drag all of its products down with closed source.
There, fixed that for you.
That is also a valid statement. It is good to see community support continue, especially to ease the transition. Your comment about Microsoft closed source nature is also very perceptive - access to the source code make the difference between good community legacy support and bad community legacy support.
Now that magic quotes are off by default... (Score:5, Funny)
FRIST PSOT!!!!!'); DELETE FROM replies WHERE reply != 'FRIST PSOT!!!!!'; --
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Yeah, I know this post was meant to be funny, but anyone that depended on magic_quotes for 'security' needs their head examined. All magic_quotes ever did was cause trouble, and I'm sad to see it's still an option in PHP 5 (indeed, many web hosts explicitly enable it too).
On the plus side, php.net has the work-around to servers with it enabled in a solution that's practically cut-and-paste.
Obi-Wan (Score:3, Funny)
I felt a great disturbance in the CVS, as if millions of lines of code suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
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Re:Obi-Wan (Score:4, Funny)
Backward Compatability (Score:2)
I feel like this is only even a story at all because valid PHP 4 code isn't necessarily valid PHP 5 code.
Curious choices by the PHP folks to me, but I'm not really deeply invested enough in PHP to fairly call them good or bad.
Re:Backward Compatability (Score:5, Informative)
I feel like this is only even a story at all because valid PHP 4 code isn't necessarily valid PHP 5 code.
Curious choices by the PHP folks to me, but I'm not really deeply invested enough in PHP to fairly call them good or bad.
The reason for those curious choices was the even more curious choices in the languages design in earlier versions. I would say however, that even the best design gets outdated in time, and it's better to sacrafice compatibility at some point.
Key web-related technologies have reinvented themselves and it's hard to say where they would be if they didn't do so. ASP.NET (vs. old ASP) comes to mind, which was a radical rearchitecture. Flash is another example (on the client side), which almost completely rewrote their rendering stack in version 8, and completely rewrote their script runtime stack in Flash 9.
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This is common when you use the three-segment versioning method.
If you raise the first number, you are generally doing so to indicate your backwards compatibility is being broken and that you are changing or removing features in addition to adding new ones.
Changing the middle number means you're keeping compatibility with the previous version, but adding new major fuctionality.
Changing the last number means you're just adding patches that do not affect compatibility or features.
And you eventually have to st
Good News/Bad News (Score:3, Interesting)
The bad news: Lots of unsupported legacy code in the wild.
The good news: Any conversion that needs to happen means more work for developers all around! Yay for a paycheck!
Seriously though, PHP4 was fine for what it was, but it definitely had its drawbacks. Poor object support, poor error handling (No try..catch blocks? Seriously?), no type-hinting, no foreach statement, etc. PHP5 is so much easier to work with, and honestly most sites should've made the switch a few years back if they haven't already.
Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:5, Interesting)
Where did you get your php info? foreach was introduced in PHP4, eval as well for error catching.
The object support was nasty, but still better then the pseudo-object crap that perl has. Neither has private objects and vars outside of normal scoping but at least php didn't require passing extra arguments and shifting them out via a pseudo-constructor.
Also, you could type cast in php4 as well.
Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:5, Funny)
Where did you get your php info?
I get mine from phpinfo();
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Ah, ok, you got me on foreach, I could've sworn that was a PHP5 thing. As for eval, you gotta admit that is a pretty poor substitute for try..catch blocks.
I'm not talking about type-casting, I'm talking about type-hinting. Instead of defining function foo($myVar) you can define function bar(MyClass $foo), so you (supposedly) know what you're getting as a parameter. Of course it only works on objects and arrays, but hey, better than nothing right?
I know what you mea
OOP is Overyped (Score:3, Insightful)
The object support [in 4] was nasty, but still better then the pseudo-object crap that perl has.
Be careful. Some of us feel that OOP is overhyped. While I can see use for it in operating systems and systems software, eCommerce and biz apps have had a difficult time making use of OOP well. I've yet to see a decent example of OOP helping these. (Of course, "decent" is often in the eyes of the beholder.) But, I might change my mind if shown a decent example.
Re:OOP is Overyped (Score:5, Interesting)
OOP is not overhyped. Just misunderstood. PHP4's object model really was a bit nasty, as evidenced by the projects that jumped into using it before they understood how it was meant to work (e.g., oscommerce).
Decent example of php5 (zf, in fact) e-commerce (bleh): Magento [magentocommerce.com], 2008 sourceforge best new project.
The reason that there is a lot of procedural php4 code out there is that the older api's don't make sense in php5's paradigm. With the millions of people used to writing to api's like Drupal's or Wordpress's, the change was glacial.
But it is totally clear: PHP5 better than PHP4. OOP good.
Note: I am a former Dijkstra devotee. I've heard every argument you can imagine against OOP.
Re:OOP is Overhyped (Score:3, Interesting)
What specifically does OO make better about it? What's an example?
That would make you well suited to describe and illustrate what changed your mind. Dijkstra was mostly pre-relational, so he may hold a RAM-centric view of data structures. OO is missing a foundation in set theory, and this is what relational adds. OO is
Re:OOP is Overhyped (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many 1000+ page books on the subject. I think this question is beyond the scope of a slashdot comment. But, as a taste: More literate and intuitive api's. Type safety. MVC.
Specifically about Magento: It uses a framework that has been systematically tested (another advantage of oop) and is based on the MVC + Front Controller paradigm for web apps. It went from whiteboard to working in 3 months. It's simple to extend.
Regarding what changed my mind about OOP: I learned to use OOP techniques. I never had any negative feelings towards OOP, I was just in love with single-in/single-out purity of the old ways.
OOP is great for my shop. Of course you can accomplish the same result, theoretically, with any two complete languages/paradigms. The question is whether you want anyone else to read your code (or whether you want to be able to read it in 6 months), how long you want to take writing/researching it, what your requirements are for code quality, and what kind of environment you want to work in if you're on a team. Obviously, if it's just you and you have eternity to write and debug your application, then oop doesn't offer any advantages.
My advice is just to try it out. You can use your Dijkstra-fu inside of methods and in novel data structures, while at the same time experiencing the convenience and consistency of magic axiomatic things like "programming to an interface." It took me a few months of mind-destroying pain to change the way I built a program, but it is very much worth it. Apologies if you've heard this advice before.
Btw, you sound like you probably know a lot more about Djikstra than I do. :) There are so many ways... OOP is now just a another tool for me. The paradigm that has taken its place as my ocd target is functional languages like Haskell.
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FWIW, I love RDBMs, and all my software uses a certain well-known package. In fact, glancing at my whiteboard, I see an ERD.
For the most part, my 3NF schemas work fine with the abstraction layer of the framework I'm using at moment. It can be tricky to model correlation tables properly, but there are many applications where an ActiveRecord-type model works fine out-of-the-box.
Just saying that OOP and RDBMs don't have to be mutually exclusive (and that I love set theory and relational databases).
On the rest
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We have QT4.3 that is a "decent cross-language GUI kit"
(Ok, I really think it's a really good OO toolkit, showing how to do MVC right :}. (But they also had qt3 as a training ground :}
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What specifically does OO make better about it? What's an example?
OK. You already got a bunch of silly responses sending you to read think books.
But as developer who got first experience with OO about 15 years ago, I'd opine that OO is all about improved code organization.
There is literally ZERO of OO code which can't be written in plain functional language.
To me, biggest advantage of OO, is that it allows (at least partially) implement interfaces between code parts. Also some OO languages allow you make sure the interfaces are followed to some degree. OO is als
On the other hand (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is asking you to like OOP in this case, but if you are going to support it, support it well - not half-assed.
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Be careful. Some of us feel that OOP is overhyped.
I wouldn't say overhyped. I think it provides a good design framework for large systems.
However, I don't think it's always particularly well taught. To all intents and purposes, it's a superset of top-down programming - it's just that you don't apply top-down ideas until you get to the stage of writing individual methods. Thing is, as far as I could gather when I was in university only a handful of lecturers (generally the more experienced senior ones) actually understood this.
Perhaps I should have gone
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Agreed. Maybe I'm an asshole (no wait, that's a guaranteed fact), but I have no pity for anyone still running PHP4... if they wanted to switch, they had all the time in the world to do so. PHP5 has been out for what, 4 or 5 years now ? Anyone still running on the old stuff is either happy with it and shouldn't bother upgrading, or hopelessly incompetent.
That said, I'm very eager to see PHP6... I don't really want to switch over to Ruby / Python, largely for performance reasons, so I'm curious to see wha
Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:4, Interesting)
Does not compute. If you are using PHP5 to its potential, then most of your coding should be abstracted away from the old built-in (and inconsistently named) functions. You should never have to touch them.
PHP5 is not a shit language, in any way, and it even manages to be a superset to the older versions (which were, admittedly, crude).
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I don't really want to switch over to Ruby / Python, largely for performance reasons
Why, do you need your language to be slower than Python [debian.org] but not slower than PHP [debian.org]?
PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by. (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer this quote [reddit.com]:
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Whoosh
As a big fan of PHP who cut his teeth on PHP4 .. (Score:5, Informative)
Let me also say they're wrong about legacy systems being slow to migrate: PHP5 runs PHP4 code just fine (notwithstanding a few copy-on-write and unassigned reference issues, which are very easy to fix).
PHP5, in this context, would be better called "Zend Engine 2", since that's what the real update is. PHP4 the language is essentially just a subset of PHP5.
Incidentally (perhaps) the phpMyAdmin 3.0.0 beta just came out yesterday which sacrifices Zend Engine 1 (PHP4) support. It also drops MySQL 4 support, and I think lots of projects will follow suit; PHP4 is going to drag MySQL 4 with it, which is also great.
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Please don't let anyone get away with calling the internet the cloud!
Traditionally, when network engineers and administrators draw diagrams of networks, they represent the connection to the Internet as a big bumpy object not unlike a child's drawing of a cloud. I have heard old hackers who used to work in the telecommunications industry during the 80's and 70's describe this object as 'the cloud', meaning the Internet.
This term predates the current usage by several decades, and is in fact the source of the current usage
This is a gentle but pedantic reminder that, if you're
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Please don't let anyone get away with calling the internet the cloud!
Traditionally, when network engineers and administrators draw diagrams of networks, they represent the connection to the Internet as a big bumpy object not unlike a child's drawing of a cloud. I have heard old hackers who used to work in the telecommunications industry during the 80's and 70's describe this object as 'the cloud', meaning the Internet.
This term predates the current usage by several decades, and is in fact the source of the current usage
This is a gentle but pedantic reminder that, if you're going to make an absolute assertion, make sure it is the correct assertion.
I know where the term came from, that's one of the reasons I find it so annoying. :-(
We don't call resistors "jagged lines" and inductors "curly loops", so why call the internet "the cloud"?
It isn't actually a cloud, and saying "cloud" isn't any shorter or clearer than "internet" (in fact less clear).
It's just a new IT business fad which lets IT staff make something familiar sound new, I think.
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It isn't actually a cloud, and saying "cloud" isn't any shorter or clearer than "internet" (in fact less clear).
Dude, there's like a hundred million things in the technical world that are called things that they're not based on nothing more then decades of habit. I mean, is a "bug" really just an insect? Does "bootstrap" really mean a piece of leather attached to a boot? To single out this one example is just splitting hairs.
Okay, so you don't like the term "The Cloud". That's cool, nothing wrong with that, but you have no grounds on which to object it. It is as valid a term as "bug" or "bootstrap" or countless
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There are better examples though which make your point (like "firewall", which I think would be better as just "packet filter"), but these phrases are old and cast in stone, so there's no point trying to fight them anyway. It'd now, unfortunately, be more confusing to try and change them than to just stick with
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"Bug" is just "flaw", "Cloud" is more concise than "an enormous, globally interconnected network".
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"Bug" is just "flaw", "Cloud" is more concise than "an enormous, globally interconnected network".
"Bug" implies more than "flaw". It's specifically not a design flaw, and it's not a problem where the user thinks something should be done a differently. "Cloud" doesn't imply anything more than "internet" though
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"Bug" is more concise than "a software flaw which causes behavior the developers didn't intend"
It's also due to the fact that early in the history of computing, a fault was found to be due to a moth being trapped between the contacts of a relay [worldwidewords.org].
For what it's worth, I don't like people calling the Internet "the Cloud" either.
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Depends on where you are. If you're in the Internet could, then it's a fog, not a cloud ;-).
Anyway, to me "cloud" is not same as the Internet, it's roughly the same as "rest of the Internet". This is an important distinction! Local site is not in the cloud. Remote site (for example another office of the same company) usually is not be in the cloud either, or it could be considered a separate cloud, even though connection to it goes through the big Internet cloud.
The totality of Internet is not dependant on
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To me "cloud" in network diagrams has nothing to do with Internet. I use clouds to remove irrelevant clutter from the diagrams. It can be any network (or part of one) which internal layout isn't relevant for that diagram. It could be corporate backbone, Internet, PSTN, whatever.
Then again, that's just how to visualize something on a diagram and I'd not part of the network or internet "cloud".
Re:As a big fan of PHP who cut his teeth on PHP4 . (Score:4, Funny)
Traditionally, when network engineers and administrators draw diagrams of networks, they represent the connection to the Internet as a big bumpy object not unlike a child's drawing of a cloud.
That's true, and I've done it often enough myself. I also draw databases in the traditional manner, and yet I never feel the need to refer to them as cylinders.
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Fact check please? (Score:5, Interesting)
I question the validity of these assumptions. My first salaried job was programming PHP/FI 2 (1998). I cannot find a single product I have been involved with or even used in the past (which contains PHP code), that hasn't upgraded. Systems written in PHP could only benefit from the improvements in 5 and there's almost nothing written in PHP that's so critical* that it wouldn't be upgraded by the current developers or new developers trained in 5.
*This is both a side effect of the language design and the people who write it.
Can someone give some examples of products stuck in 4.0?
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Ubersmith.
They provide billing automation and equipment management for lots of hosting companies and datacenters. They said that they're supposedly "working" on a PHP5 version, but that statement was said months ago.
Notice "Ubersmith does not support PHP 5.x at this time" on the order pages of both:
http://www.ubersmith.com/products/pro/order.php [ubersmith.com] and
http://www.ubersmith.com/products/lite/order.php [ubersmith.com]
From the looks of their blog, their appliance version supports PHP5, but not so sure about the self-hosted versio
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I sell PHP scripts, and I'd estimate 30-50% of my customers are still using PHP 4. Many of them have told me they tried PHP 5, but it broke some other ancient script they were using. Or some are still using four year old versions of my scripts and refuse to update.
The users aren't programmers. You can't tell them it's easy to fix the little problems in their legacy scripts, because they struggle to upload files, let alone write code. They're going to stick with PHP 4 until they're dragged forward kicking an
Obligatory post (Score:3, Informative)
For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life.
I'd like to propose that Slashdot "editors" be stripped of that title, and from now on be referred to simply as "approvers" - there's obviously no editing involved in the job at all.
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I'd like to propose that those who complain about Slashdot editing standards are now simply referred to as "whiners".
This is a blog - you're a guest here. Get over it.
Obligatory Crap (Score:2)
I could quibble with your definitions of "blog" and "guest", but it doesn't really matter. Misinformation is misinformation, whether it's from a blog or a newspaper. People have a right, even a duty, to complain about somebody who sloppily shares "facts" that are really nonsense. It's not "whining", any more than it's "whining" to complain about a rock thrown through your window.
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Since when is /. a blog???
Suspect /. being a blog is news (hey, maybe that would be more news worthy than some of the news ;) ) to alot of people on here...
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Official "Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5" document (Score:5, Informative)
http://docs.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php [php.net]
You know what? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know what? I'm sick and tired of the fact that every PHP related post to Slashdot ends up sludgefest of old jokes, one-line jabs at PHP, and misinformation.
Official ending of PHP4 support is a big thing in the PHP community. If you're a reader of Planet-PHP, you'll know this; for almost all of 08/08/08 there was nothing but end-of-life celebrations from the bloggers. The community has done an exceptional job at getting developers, open-source projects and hosters alike to migrate to PHP5 for such a heavily used language. And we will have to surmount even bigger difficulties for PHP6 and Unicode, which unlike PHP5, breaks backwards compatibility with any project that treats strings as binary data. Migrating PHP4 to PHP5 is not difficult; often it's as simple as an edit to the server migration. PHP6 will definitely demand code changes.
For those of us who use and "have to deal with" (yes, we have our annoyances too) with PHP on a daily basis, this is good news. For the rest of you, please contribute something meaningful, or forever hold your peace.
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You know what? I'm sick and tired of the fact that every PHP related post to Slashdot ends up sludgefest of old jokes, one-line jabs at PHP, and misinformation.
That's just slashdot, it's nothing against PHP specifically. Java, .NET, perl, Windows, OS X, etc all get the same treatment to greater and lesser degree.
The sad fact of the matter is that many of the most vocal people here have the maturity of a teenager.
Upgrading is not that hard... (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to PHP5 quite a while back. I started with 4 and had already been programing nice (long tags in html, program with globals off, etc.) so there was no issue for me, everything just worked on 5. I do have one script I found on sourceforge (dead project) that doesn't work on 5, probably used something deprecated from 3 slated for removal after 4. I don't expect conversion of that to be too serious either.
I think a lot of the FUD is being placed on ISPs who run PHP4 servers and may have outdated cpanels or other pre-set PHP apps. I would think maybe a weeks worth of work for most mom and pops to get the upgrade complete (a lot it setting up automating on any data upgrade conversions) but it's surely not the end of the world.
Go PHP 5! (Score:5, Interesting)
For those wondering how many projects will be left out in the cold, here's your answer:
http://gophp5.org/ [gophp5.org]
Over 100 PHP projects and products and over 200 web hosts that have been committed to PHP 5.2 and no earlier for over a year. GoPHP5 launched before the PHP development team announced an EOL for PHP 4. While I don't believe for a second that it was the only reason they made that decision, I also don't believe for a second that it didn't have a big influence on it.
The push to drop PHP 4 support came from people using PHP in production in the first place. Those of us who get paid to write PHP code are cheering at the top of our lungs, because now we can actually get real work done.
Go PHP 5!
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I'm not 100% sure what his point was, since he doesn't make much sense, but I can state the objection to 4 still existing:
The developers of PHP can now spend time working on 5 & 6 instead of maintaining 4. Progress can be made on things that matter that could not be before.
I'm not sure it really makes all that much of a difference, my self. Progress will happen whether someone is maintaining the old version or not... And there's no guarantee the progress will be faster now.
Awesome. (Score:2)
Now I feel slightly better about having forced my colleagues to upgrade PHP to version 5.
In my defense, I was using array_walk_recursive, but I'm sure they were quite frustrated by the problems I created.
Migration woes (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a lot of people saying that they're surprised anyone's still using PHP 4, when PHP 5 has been out for so long. Well, I can guarantee you there's a lot of legacy PHP 4 codebases out there; converting to 5 is not always as easy as going over what's in the migration page on php.net [php.net]. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, we have tends of thousands of code files spread across numerous systems; our live web pool is around 100 machines, and we cannot take the website down in order to update it. (I can't tell you why.) So updates have to be made live. We don't have a proper staging environment, either, but we have come up with a number of (horrible) mechanisms for dealing with this situation.
In our particular (unfortunate) case, we had about half a dozen custom PHP extensions that were all written by our former CTO, who left the company about a year and a half ago. He wasn't really big into documentation, and our technical management was very poor; we had a guy go through our 65,000-file codebase and make all the little tweaks necessary for a vanilla 4-to-5 migration, but it took us six months of wrangling with all these extensions to get them to work well under 5.1 (we're still having trouble with 5.2).
Plus, it's not just a matter of dealing with the technology; like a lot of companies, management here doesn't like to put resources into things that don't have visible benefits -- and cleaning up the codebase/rebuilding the dev environment just isn't something they see a lot of value in. (We've finally convinced them it's important and needs to be done; we're operating without source control for about 99% of our code. YES, I KNOW.) We didn't even seriously start pushing to get things up to PHP 5 until January, and it took until July to actually make it happen.
The point is, mismanagement and bad development environment/codebase design early on (several years ago) have meant that we're upgrading to PHP 5 years later than we should have. It's not that we didn't know how to do it once we decided to.
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So you don't have the tools to do your job, yet are expected to do your job?
Sucks to be you.
PHP 6? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder when we will see PHP 6 (which will have unicode support).
PHP 6 has been in development forever, but there doesn't seem to be any roadmap online that I can find.
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Will anyone notice? (Score:2)
I mean, if they were interested in security patches they wouldn't be using pHP in the first place.
Put in the hours. Do the move. (Score:2)
But when PHP5 came out, I downloaded it and spent about a week going through all of our PHP4 specific code and changed it to PHP5.
Just like I did years before that when PHP3 became PHP4.
Granted it was only a couple thousand line of code, but you gotta bite the bullet once in a while and it hurts a lot less to do it early instead of late.
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I'm, on the other hand, fine with anything Microsoft being killed, with the exception of their optical mouse.
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The difference is that PHP5 works great, whereas Vista is a steaming pile of crap. If Vista was any good, I'd be fine with MS killing XP. but it's not.
The difference is that PHP5 works great, whereas Vista is a steaming pile of crap. If Vista was any good, I'd be fine with MS killing XP. but it's not.
Another difference is that the $$$ cost of upgrading from PHP 4 -> PHP 5 is nill. THe $$$ cost of downgrading from XP to Vista is around $200-$500. That said, the time cost of upgrading to PHP 5 could be on the order of weeks to months, whereas the time cost of downgrading to Vista could be on the order of hours to days.
Really, comapring an application apple and an OS orange is not quite level.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:5, Informative)
PHP 4 was released in 2000 and is finally getting an EOL date but is still going to receive patches. Microsoft XP was released in 2001 and its EOL date is 2009, with security patches until 2014.
Technically the EOL was announced in 2007, and it was the beginning of 2008. What ends today is official security patch support.
The patches offered by Mr. Esser are not official, though I'd say he's more than qualified for the job.
Overall, especially for an open source project, I'd say the transition was handled pretty well. What's worrying me more is where the new versions are heading, but that's another discussion.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:5, Insightful)
People will still be allowed to get PHP 4 after it is EOL'd.
Try buying a new copy of XP now. Even getting a computer with XP (and not paying for Vista) is getting difficult now.
That is the difference.
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True, but for the most part, PHP5 doesn't change things from PHP4 (some default configuration settings have changed for the better, but flipping a bit to go back to the old way isn't exactly hard). It's not like you're dealing with a complete new UI, just some additional functionality. Comparing a close source operating system to an open source scripting language isn't too fair of a comparison.
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In PHP4 objects are passed by value. In PHP5 they're passed by reference.
In PHP5 you also have public, private, and protected variables.
In PHP4 class constructors were the same name as the class. In PHP5 it's __construct.
I could go on about the difference, but I won't. There's a lot of differences between the two.
I'm glad PHP4 has reached EOL.
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In PHP4 objects are passed by value. In PHP5 they're passed by reference.
This is probably one of the most misunderstood features of PHP5. They are passed by reference, but they're also copy-on-write references. As soon as the variables value is changed, a copy is made, and the function/method then uses the local copy (as if a copy were made in the first place like in php4).
Nothing has changed for the programmer except a reduction in memory usage.
In PHP5 you also have public, private, and protected variables.
Yes, optional. The old var keyword works the same as using public.
In PHP4 class constructors were the same name as the class. In PHP5 it's __construct.
Again, optional. There is also a __destruct() method in php5.
I could go on about the difference, but I won't. There's a lot of differences between the two.
Ther
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In PHP4 objects are passed by value. In PHP5 they're passed by reference.
This is probably one of the most misunderstood features of PHP5. They are passed by reference, but they're also copy-on-write references. As soon as the variables value is changed, a copy is made, and the function/method then uses the local copy (as if a copy were made in the first place like in php4).
Nothing has changed for the programmer except a reduction in memory usage.
That is not correct. If you pass an object to a function, and modify a property of that object in the function, the object will still have the modified property outside the function.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:4, Informative)
I can buy a copy of XP, upgrade or full install, retail or OEM at newegg with no problems.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:4, Insightful)
And I can build PHP4 or PHP5 from source, or intall binaries, without sending any money at all to Newegg.
Re:By Neruos (Score:5, Funny)
Re:By Neruos (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean, an african or an european car?
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...aka Pythons on a Plane.
Re:Good time to migrate to PHP 7... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah. Even without the frameworks, I like mod_python a whole lot more than PHP. PHP seems like a bunch of nasty hacks to me.
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Pfft, I can't stand the whole mod_$language thing. It ties you to Apache, it ties you to a substandard Apache MPM, it adds another interdependency between your webserver and your actual application and makes seperating them harder.
I far prefer application servers, with the webserver left to serve/proxy HTTP and related protocols rather than running your entire application. I'd like to see better support for this with PHP; i.e. a HTTP SAPI that runs a simple webserver, rather like its daemonized FastCGI su
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I don't care about being tied to Apache -- I believe it is the only web server I'll ever need.
Not sure what you mean about tying it to a "substandard MPM" -- AFAIK mod_python can run under prefork and worker (the only two that really matter at this point) and maybe others.
Agree with some of your other points though.
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Huh?
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Netcraft says SQL is dying, movie at eleven
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