PHP5: Ready For The Enterprise?

Thought I would post this article for all who has not seen....

http://www.theopenenterprise.com/story/TOE20021204S0001

So is every1 looking forward to the release of PHP5? How different do you think it will be to the amateur programmer like me? Will it make much difference that more handles will be used?

Well the engine will likely be way faster and a deeper OOP approach seems to be the two big things.

I wonder if OPP support is finally going to be stable. I don't wan't to have to re-write my classes all the time.

um...whats OOP?

object-oriented programming

Excited about it

Yeah, should be a great thing. The main focus seems to be on more structured OOP, which I guess is a good thing. Now if we can just get everyone programming in classes...

---John Holmes...

I think I am going to be pretty happy with PHP5. But, I have to admit that I wish PHP5 would have a variable scoping overhaul, also.

Maybe that's too much to ask, but I wish the variable scoping were more like Perl. Especially such things as the very useful my variable construct, which scopes a variable inside its enclosing code block, include file, or eval() block. (http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.005_03/pod/func/my.html)

It's a seemingly little thing, but it really helps for flexibility on large projects, especially when you are adding external modules to some large application, where you might not be familiar with all the details of the app.

Other than that, I agree that the simplicity of PHP is the major advantage over Perl for web application programming.

I'm still curious about Perl 6, though. It looks like Perl 6 will be almost a meta-language, because you will be able to declare "modes" for how you want to work, which can do such things as limit the available syntax choices, set shorthands, etc... This means that someone could conceivably come up with a mode for Perl 6 web programming that would be as simple as PHP. Theoretically speaking, of course.

It's going to be interesting to see where all this ends up.

I am anxious to see both of them.
I do believe that PHP will gain a lot of ground with version 5. There will be a lot more flexibility with oop. We should also get a major performance boost out of the new zend engine.

I never really moved into PHP4 because of some key weaknesses vs. Perl - OOP and variable scope being two major sticking points. Rycamor - trust me, the variable scoping is no small thing. Ever since I started using 'strict' in all my scripts, I write much cleaner, efficient code, partially due to the fact that it forces me to watch my scopes. Even something as simple as losing the "our" statement when I drop back to 5.004 development is a serious loss sometimes.

However, I am beginning to watch PHP5 a little more intently now, and may decide to finally move solidly into PHP with this release... we'll wait and see... I can't wait to see the next versions of these two powerhouse languages.. should be interesting.

That's why I said it is a seemingly small thing . It may seem small to people who don't use Perl extensively, but I agree that it is a major help for serious application design.

No, really, TRUST me - it's NOT a small thing

Gimme a break... rough week this week has been..

Ditto on variable scoping. This drives me NUTS in php. . . And that fact that everything is in the global namespace, which makes things very confusing, though admittedly perl makes a much greater use of external modules than PHP.

I have the luxury of doing most of my web scripting work on dedicated servers with mod_perl installed and configured by yours truly, so I just haven't had the need to use PHP too much.

Were I coding mostly on shared servers, I'd absolutely be using PHP more, it's a great little language for web scripting. Glad to see it get even better, let's hope there won't be as many security patches for version 5 as there has been for version 4.

Hear hear for perl6 and PHP5! Keep it coming!

(On slashdot, this would probably be scored as redundant. . .)

I can't wait!