Simon Willison's Weblog: php5

Hacky holidays on OS X

2007-12-29T11:49:15+00:00

Jeremy Keith documents how to get PHP 5 and Apache 2 virtual hosts running on Leopard.

Tags: apache, apache2, jeremy-keith, leopard, macos, php, php5, virtualhosts

J4P5: Javascript For PHP 5

2007-07-12T22:24:58+00:00

“J4P5 is a JavaScript interpreter written in PHP 5, that allows to run untrusted scripts in a sandbox on your server. It aims to implement most of Ecma-262 3rd edition.”

Via Tom Morris

Tags: ecmascript, j4p5, javascript, php, php5

GoPHP5.org

2007-07-08T10:08:50+00:00

GoPHP5.org

A campaign to encourage a mass switchover from PHP 4 to PHP 5 on February 8th 2008, by co-ordinating both hosting companies and PHP projects.

Tags: hosting, php, php5

PHP: JSON Functions

2006-11-03T12:25:24+00:00

PHP: JSON Functions

Now bundled in PHP 5. A great way to move data from PHP to some other language.

Tags: json, php, php5

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

2004-07-14T05:35:46+00:00

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

A migration guide from the PHP manual.

Via Joseph Scott's Blog

Tags: php, php5

Zend PHP 5 Goodies

2004-03-21T21:34:09+00:00

Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:

XML in PHP 5 - What's New? by Christian Stocker
PHP SOAP Extension by Dmitry Stogov
SQLite Introduction by Ilia Alshanetsky
Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5 by John Coggeshall
Com_dotnet by Wez Furlong
Using ext/mysqli: Part I - Overview and Prepared Statements by Zak Greant and Georg Richter

The Tidy functions look particularly useful, especially if you are interested in maintaining clean markup within your PHP applications.

One thing that I would like to see addressed with the full release of PHP 5 is the increasing fragmentation of the PHP manual. The single online manual now covers every version of PHP from 3 upwards, making it increasingly difficult to use effectively if you are targetting older versions of PHP. The Python site maintains archived versions of previous documentation snapshots, making it easy to refer to the documentation of the version of the language you are using. With the major changes between versions 4 and 5 of PHP a similar approach could be highly beneficial.

Tags: php, php5, zend

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

2004-02-25T20:46:36+00:00

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

It’s getting closer...

Via The Farm

Tags: php, php5

New PHP releases

2004-02-18T03:42:12+00:00

New PHP releases

Joey reports on PHP 4.3.5 RC 2 and PHP 5.0 Beta 4

Via The Farm: The Tucows Developers' Hangout :: New PHP releases

Tags: php, php5

XML highlights for PHP 5

2003-12-20T23:44:53+00:00

XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features (via Keith) does exactly what it says on the tin. Here are the bits that caught my eye:

HTML Support in ext/xml - PHP 5 can load in not well-formed HTML documents and create a DOM tree from them.
XPath support - and it works with HTML loaded via the above.
XML Validation, including support for RelaxNG! I wonder if they'll support compact syntax.
Extending DOM Classes - this is really cool, and demonstrates how much more mature PHP 5's OOP support is.

Unforuntately, my biggest criticism of PHP remains: all of the above is supported using functions built in to the default namespace! The lack of a smart namespace system (like Python's modules) really gets in the way when you start trying to write reusable code or large applications.

Tags: php, php5, xml

XML in PHP5

2003-12-20T21:56:17+00:00

XML in PHP5

An in-depth look into advanced XML features

Via Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Links - December 20, 2003

Tags: php, php5, xml

Excellent PHP 5 Overview

2003-08-03T21:41:03+00:00

HarryF's PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You is the most detailed overview of the features we can expect from the next major PHP release that I've seen yet.

Tags: php, php5

PHP5 and Questioning OOP

2003-04-11T09:44:49+00:00

An Interview with Sterling Hughes on PHP5 from the PHP-Con site:

Personally, while I have programmed with both C++ and Java, I am mostly a procedural guy. I feel that most object oriented programming consists of abstracting different problems into the same problem and then resolving that problem. Sure it makes it easier, but its incredibly inefficient for developing a small set of interconnected programs, which really is the whole point in web development.

That's not to say I'm unhappy with PHP5. Most of the stuff in PHP5 is great, most notably exceptions; I'll certainly be taking advantage of many of the new features in Zend Engine 2. But most of my code is procedural, and Zend Engine 2 is mostly an object oriented functionality upgrade.

That's the second time this week I've come across an opinion that questions the benefits of the OOP-at-all-costs approach to programming. The first was in Paul Graham's The Hundred Year Language:

Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they're reusable because they're language, whether they're written in an object-oriented style or not.

I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today.

As undergraduates, we have been exposed to the joys of object oriented programming from our first week at Uni, possible because we're supposedly destined for the large organisations Paul mentions. It's nice to see the view from the other side of the fence for a change.

Tags: object-oriented-programming, php, php5

PHP5 info from Sterling Hughes

2003-03-23T16:05:54+00:00

Sterling Hughes has posted the slides he will be using for his presentation on PHP 5 next week. They provide a great deal of insight in to the new additions to look forward to in PHP 5, including a few I hadn't heard about before.

One of the most instantly useful looking is Class Autoloading. By creating a function called __autoload() you can add logic to automatically include a class the first time it is called. The example code explains this much better:


<?php
function __autoload($classname) {
    include_once("$classname.php");
}
$mono = new monkey;
$mono->scratch();
?>

PHP 5 will also feature support for class access control, interfaces and type hinting where a function or method can declare the type it expects for each of its arguments. It's sounding more and more like Java all the time, but seeing as all of the new support for stricter control are optional I don't see this as a disadvantage at all. Coders who want serious OOP can have it, while people knocking out a quick script don't need to worry about them at all.

Tags: object-oriented-programming, php, php5

coWiki uses PHP5

2003-03-21T23:53:57+00:00

coWiki is the first open source project I have seen being developed with PHP 5, using snapshots from CVS. It looks like a really neat wiki system. Of particular interest for PHP heads is the development log on the front page (sorry, no permalinks) which provides some insight in to the progress of PHP 5's development.

Tags: php, php5

PHP5 Preview

2003-02-27T23:33:31+00:00

A great preview describing the features we have to look forward to in PHP 5. Proper object reference handling is going to be sweet.

Tags: php, php5

PHP for the enterprise

2002-12-07T23:16:53+00:00

PHP5: Ready For The Enterprise? (via Scott) discusses forthcoming improvements in PHP5 and asks if they will lead to acceptance of PHP as a suitable language for enterprise applications. It looks like a killer factor could well be PHP's improved Java and .NET integration abilities. Write the back-end in Java/.NET and use PHP for the front end - that way you get a powerful web-specific scripting language for the front end of your site. Then if you ever need to change technologies on the back end your front end code can be reused.

Tags: php, php5