Builder.com.au: PHP 4 on death row
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Builder.com.au has picked up on "the death of PHP4" story that's been making the rounds in the community ever since the announcement late last week:   The still popular version 4 of PHP, an open-source scripting language that lets servers create customised Web pages such as online catalogues, will lose its support after a seven-year run. [...] The announcement came on the third anniversary of the launch of PHP 5, and project programmers said they want to focus on the upcoming PHP 6. PHP 4 was released in 2000.   They mention some of the issues that this will cause with hosting companies and developers alike and includes quotes from Andi Gutmans, Matt Mullenweg and Rasmus Lerdorf.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:My TwitterMEMPDO Connection FactorySimple RPN InterpreterPHP Dial GaugeColor CAPTCHApaging_classDigiOz Indexertc_mydbTextSQLgAjaxThe One Hundred Gamebasic_dbHTML DocumentMyACL
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:The Bakery: Six New Articles/Tutorials PostedEvert Pot's Blog: PHP: Arrays vs. ObjectsDevArticles: Learning AJAXInternet Super Hero: PHP: mysqli_fetch_all()David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)I/O Reader: 15 Cool Things & 12 Things to Dislike About PHPProPHP Podcast: Newscast - August 16, 2007PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 08.17.2007PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
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Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".   How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.   If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.
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Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager for the current PHP5 series, has announced the posting of the latest release canidate - PHP 5.2.0. RC4.   Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.   You can grab the files here:  BZipped GZipped
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php|architect has a new link to an article from OnJava.com concerning the use of JMS with PHP.
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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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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Symfony Project: Book preview: read the Unit Tests chapterWebCheatSheet.com: Secure File Upload with PHPMichi Kono's Blog: The Best PHP Book Out ThereThe Bakery: Basic User Authentication in (CakePHP) 1.2.xPHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPDavid Coallier's Blog: Zend_Db Without PDO part #3 (SVN Repository)?Community News: PHPLondon Conference 2007 AnnouncedMatthew O'Phinney's Blog: Overloading arrays in PHP 5.2.0Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: 5.2.1 RC3 Released for testingJob Posting: Telio Telecom AS Seeks Senior Web Developer (Oslo, Norway)The Bakery: LightTPD and CakePHP setup in subdirectoriesJob Posting: Yahoo! Seeks Address Book Front-End Engineer (Sunnyvale, CA)HowTo Forge: PHP Programming BasicsJob Posting: Blue State Digital Seeks PHP/AJAX developer for politcal/tech consulting (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Tutorial Part 7 : Usability Improvements
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll of the week. This time they asked the slightly odd question of opinions on the PHP Throwdown event - "The Rules of PHP Throwdown Include".   Seems like the question might have confused some others because the votes were notably lower than in some previous weeks. There was a tie for first place, though - both coming in with 6.8% of the votes were the "You can use PHP4 or PHP 5, MySQL or SQLite, Ajax, HTML, XHTML, and Javascript but no Flash" and "All" options. Dead last with no votes was the "All applications must be licensed with a CC compatible license" option.   They've also posted a new poll for this week asking which of the options you think still ring true when it comes to PHP:  PHP administrators like to compile PHP in Summer Register global is not dead memory_limit is not used PHP applications handle 100 Mb files
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:JPEG Slicerclass upload fileFeed GeneratorCSV CreationKG MySQL ClassMYDB ClassmyYouYubeCotaÃÂ§ÃÂ£o do DollarObject  dynamic generationHTTP client classconvert
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This month's edition of php|architect has been released - complete with the "return" of a sample article.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this new tutorial that looks at making the move from PHP4's object-oriented programming up to the "more complete obejct model of PHP5" - specifically with the Decorator design pattern.   While working on a project I realized one particular solution was a pretty good way to demonstrate the decorator design pattern together with some of PHP5's features, including abstract classes, interfaces, type hinting, the final keyword and the visibility of properties and methods. This article is intended for those of you who, like myself, are moving from object-oriented programming, including some use of design patterns, in PHP4, to the more complete object model of PHP5.   He sets up a scenario about the development of an online pizza ordering system to show how to "decorate" a pizza with each of the toppings on a list (instead of having to list out every pizza in every possible topping combination). Of course, all of the code is included and explained so you understand exactly what's happening. Finally, there's a demonstration of its usage - a simple call that grabs the stock level/name/cost of each of the items in stock (pizza combinations).
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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This week's latest PHPBarnstormer has been posted.
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a newly posted interview with Chris Hartjes a developer and speaker in the PHP community.   I first met Chris Hartjes at php|works in Toronto where he was giving his What Can PHP Learn From Ruby on Rails talk. As I described him in one of my blogs from php|works, he looks like a biker with a laptop. He's large but he's always got a smile on his face and is always available to help if you've got PHP questions. Chris was kind enough to sit down with me and spend some time talking about PHP and his work at VerticalScope . Here's how our conversation went.   They talk about how Chris got into programming (including his first computer), his work with vBulletin, a little MySQL discussion, and some thoughts on PHP6.