Tony Bibbs' Blog: Microsoft and PHP
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Tony Bibbs, in the wake of last week's surprise from Microsoft to Yahoo, has posted a few of his thoughts on the matter.   I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?   He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 1Developer.com: Threads Versus The Singleton PatternNick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHPDevShed: PHP, MySQL and the PEAR DatabaseDave Dash's Blog: Installing a PHP that can do symfony+doctrine on DreamhostChristopher Jones' Blog: Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on LinuxPHP.net: PHP 5.2.3 ReleasedPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for May 31st, 2007Secunia.com: PHP Integer Overflow Vulnerability and Security BypassPHPBuilder.com: PHP and Regular Expressions 101
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On the heels of a rant posted by Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress), Ed Finkler has posted some of his own thoughts and rebuttals to the points Matt made.   Among these points are comments about PHP5 features that "could be helping Wordpress users right now" including:   Parameterized SQL input to eliminate SQL injection attacks Filter extension to combat XSS, CSRF, etc. attacks Prepared statement/transaction support in PDO and MySQLi Improved OOP features and support (code quality, extensibility)   Ed pushes that it's not about the slow adoption of PHP5 in other places. Its about the slow adoption of it in Wordpress so far as it relates to Matt:   The thing is, support of PHP5-only features in WP would give it better speed and security right now. And especially in the case of security, Matt's reliance on what users say they want is a critical error: users don't ask about security until well after it becomes a serious issue. Wordpress has one of the worst security records of any PHP application, so I'll go out on a limb and say that it's a problem now. Even if WP users aren't talking about it, WP's core dev team should have addressed this already.
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In a new post to his blog today, Mike Potter talks about the WebORB for PHP software and a new feature based on Adobe technology - a Flex-based console.   [It] includes a service browser, as well as a number of useful examples, showing both the client side code (in Flex) and server side code in PHP. The getting started guide (again, built into the console or available on the web) provides a good tutorial for creating your first WebORB powered application.   He likes the project overall, but notes a small issue he has with starting a new project - a prompt to use the Flex Data Services. Overall, though, he has high hopes for the future of the project.
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From Dotvoid.com, there's a new posting talking about the continued use of PHP4 by developers and hosting companies and how it's effecting the community as a whole.    It is true that the PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch. This is probably, as others have stated, a circular dependency.   As ISP:s are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade. I still think the wrong people are worried. Still PHP 5 is increasing it's share and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. Hopefully before PHP 6 is here but not necessarily.    He continues on, talking about what PHP5 is really about (it's not just the objects!) and things that can help make it an easier sell to those still lagging in a PHP4 world - like the Zend Framework.
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A new post to the php.evangelism mailing list has started up a great discussion on something that a lot of users seem to be in favor of - trying to get PHP accepted by Microsoft to be included in its Dynamic Language Runtime environment.   From the inital post:   I am wondering why there isn't any effort in the PHP community to get PHP into the DLR. If nothing, DLR is yet another platform, and for a php programmer it gives one more playground to showcase his skillset. Anyway, my question is whether there would be any community effort to get MS adopt PHP into CLR too. I am sure there is a genuine customer requirement, and enterprises have made quite a bit of investment in PHP and they would all love to be able to take it to the .NET platform.   Responses so far include the pointing out of problems, possibilities like a Zend collaboration and lots of talk on what such a project would entail.
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Luke Welling takes a humorous look at something he misses in PHP - register globals being set to on.    I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company [...] so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them. I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.   I really like register_globals in PHP.    He reminicies about the days gone by of being able to assume that register_globals is turned on, the days of simpler, lighter code that's even easier for the newbies to get into. Anyone for a tshirt?
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Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.   I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.   You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).
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PHP isn't exclusively for Web pages. You can use it like Perl for cron jobs and other tasks.
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Felix Geisendorfer shares, in this new post to the ThinkingPHP blog, some of his experiences with writing his code using test driven development.   So far I've had tons of fun trying to create php code using test driven development. It caused my code to become a lot more structured/consistent because writing the tests shows you interfaces problems right away. This is because the process of writing the test forces you to think a lot more about *how* you want to use some class / piece of code vs. your traditional "how can I get task x done"-thinking.   He also points out another benefit - it makes refactoring the code even easier (so there's more of a likelyhood that you'll use it again and again). He talks specifics about a library that he's been working on and the processes he's gone through to make things work with the testing versus his normal development cycle.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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With a bit of a rebuttal for Harry Fuecks' statement that PHP has a great lack of international support comes this new posting from John Lim at PHPEverywhere.
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Giving it a second shot, Edin Kadribasic has posted another build using the new compiler from Microsoft because of some issues with the first one.   Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.   The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:  php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 2 - XML Communication/ProcessingCommunity News: Zend Framework 1.0.0 ReleasedMike Potter's Blog: Slides for today's e-seminar on Flex and PHPBlogSecurity.net: Interview with Stefan Esser on WordPressCommunity News: India's First PHP UnconferencePro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for 2007.06.28JSLabs Blog:  How to create Microsoft Office Documents with PHPPEAR Blog: Request for ideas: New developer FAQPHP-Coding-Practices.com: Composing Methods: Split Temporary VariableRob Allen's Blog: Spanish versions too!