Future of PHP Revealed 124
Anonymous Coward writes "In an interview with linuxpower.org, the developers of PHP present hot facts on the future of PHP, the next major release PHP 4.0, the license change, and what window managers they use."
jimjag note: See the Apache section for info about the latest beta release of PHP 4.0.
jimjag note: See the Apache section for info about the latest beta release of PHP 4.0.
Interesting (Score:2)
PHP is going to be a strong alternative to ASP, and its good to see that the developers are being open and forthcoming about developments in PHP. Way to go...
BeOS PHP port (Score:4)
Personally, I use HTML::Mason (Score:1)
php[34] licencing confusion (Score:1)
ok...in the linuxpower article, in the question regarding the differences between php3 and php4 licencing, one of the developers states:
"The PHP license used for PHP 4 is actually less restrictive than the PHP 3 license. In PHP 3, commercial companies had to get written permission from us in case they wanted to distribute PHP 3 with their product, we have completely removed this clause from PHP 4."
on the main page of www.php.net [php.net], it says:
"You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want."
yet, http://www.php.net/license.html [php.net] says:
PHP is distributed under 2 licenses. You are free to choose whichever license suits your requirements best. The first is the traditional GNU GPL (General Public License) and the second is the PHP License. If you wish to include PHP in a commercial product for resale, the PHP license permits it as long as the stated conditions are met.
further investigation of the aformentioned "PHP Licence" indeed shows that permission from the development team is required to include PHP in "...larger works derived from, or which bundle PHP..."
im wondering how a piece of software can be distributed under two licences, where one is the GPL which doesnt explicitly mention anything about companion licences?
ok, forgive me if this has been adressed, or if ive missed something thats blatently obvious. im not trying to dis anyone or point fingers or anything...im just trying to quench my non-lawyer curiosity.
--Siva
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Re:Zope is better! (Score:1)
yes. perhaps you could cite some reasons or examples which would serve to reinforce your claim?
--Siva
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An addition to PHP I'd love to see (Score:3)
The ASP->PHP port would be much easier if PHP supported the ASP object model. This would allow for dumb parser/translators to be written (like asp2php [i1.net]) that could work nearly flawlessly, because arbitrary translations don't have to be hardcoded in. For example, instead of hunting down how to do a redirect in PHP (ie. writing the header manually: this took me a good 15 minutes to figure out), I can just type response.redirect().
If mindshare is what this project's after, I can't think of a better way than to get a horde of gracious ASP/IIS converts. The stability and performance boosts alone should be enough to convince all but the most devout Microsoft fanatics.
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:2)
*sigh* (Score:2)
its properly moderated down because (IMNSHO) its purely argumentative. the author does not attempt to justify his claim that zope is better. the claim by itself contributes nothing to the discussion (other than to possibly motivate responses such as "no, PHP is better" or "you are dumb"), hence the post was moderated down.
you on the other hand have stated two reasons which appear to support the claim. while i have used neither Zope nor PHP, and thus am not in a position to weigh your argument, i can at least say that it has some substance and is relavant to the discussion.
--Siva
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Interresting Interview (Score:1)
- they don't get into the details enought. I would have loved to read more stuff about databases connectivity, gif creation and so on.
- they repeat themselves.
- they spent too much time on GPL != QPL.
But I insist, it is worth reading.
P.S. : at least there is one core hacker running win32, and admiting it. I think it's a good point
PHP4 is simply great ! (Score:4)
I really like perl for some of it's strenghts but unless you have a LOT of experience with it it's really hard to modify a big project written with it (from my own experience).
The C like syntax of PHP is really neat, well thought and emacs (vim also) works like a charm with it.
One of the biggest improvement of PHP4 is the speed, it's really impressive. I'm working on a rather complex site, and a single page took
Lately a java module for PHP4 has landed in the cvs. At first I wondered why they did such a thing, but take a look at this code :
$InetAddress = new Java("java.net.InetAddress");
$localhost = $InetAddress->getByName("www.yahoo.com");
$addr = $localhost->hostAddress;
Basically it does a simple nslookup on www.yahoo.com, but uses a java class to do it. Isn't it amazingly easy to use ? Think about what you will be able to do with this extension ! And of course it can use a lot of JVM (Kaffe, IBM JDK 1.1.8 for linux, sun JDK 1.2.2 for NT and others).
Any serious web developper should give PHP4 beta2 or the soon to be released beta3 and experiment a bit with it. I can understand someone not liking it, but I certainly can't understand someone not liking it without at least trying to use it !
J-F Mammet
webmaster@softgallery.com
What about Java? (Score:2)
These are the little bits I know:
- Built-in session management.
- Customizeable session swapping (session info is swapped to the hard drive if session is inactive for a specified time period.
- Modular.
- Cross-platform.
- Compiled.
- All the features of Java, such as inheritance.
Did I miss anything? Are there any huge drawbacks? The Java Web Server (JWS) home page is here [sun.com] (http://www.sun.com/980310/javawebserver/ - if I used the URL as the link's text, Slashdot filtered out the </a> for some reason).--
What does PHP stand for? (Score:1)
--
Re:Interresting Interview (Score:2)
eh...ill bet more info like that will be available off their website in the not so distant future. someone mentioned they were in need of a detailed changes/features list.
- they repeat themselves.
maybe, but they interviewed like a half-dozen developers. and its not like they repeated stuff verbatim; it was more like certain people expanding on some issues. you cant expect everyone's opinions to be mutually exclusive. and its better than half of them just saying stuff like "yeah, what he said"
- they spent too much time on GPL != QPL.
well, it seems to me that licencing is a big issue for any large open source project. with all the wacky stuff going on in the courts, i cant say i blame them for being careful with how they licence stuff. and whenever a large project changes its licencing, theres bound to be a lot of questions from the community.
i agree though, good overall.
--Siva
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Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:2)
One license, the GPL, allows anyone to take it and modify it, do whatever, so long as they release source to their mods.
The PHP license, on the other hand, allows them to include PHP in a complete product wihtout necessarily providing source, or divulging what they do (I haven't read the entire thing yet).
You can't take a piece of code that is under GPL and 'modify' or 'tie' it to another license... but in this case, they are the copyright holders, and the original authors. They can do what they want.
The comp.lang.* flamewars of the 21st century (Score:1)
PHP vs. Intercal, perhaps?
~~~~~~~~~
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:2)
Certain things can not be given out by contract. This is probably one of them.
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:1)
Re:Zope is better! (Score:2)
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:1)
~~~~~~~~~
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:2)
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:2)
That's it.
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:1)
Preprocessor". This was added to the CVS version
of the manual yesterday; the online version will
likely be updated sometime after the release of
PHP4 beta 3.
The most obvious is.. (Score:1)
As much as I love java, PHP lets you do simple
things very easily. Of course, if you want to
do extremely complicated things, java servlets
might be the way to go.
There's no "true" answer, just choose what suits
you best.
PHP or ASP, not the best. (Score:2)
Sure they work; they are good for quick prototyping, but every application I have seen written in them soon become a huge mess of "include" files that all need to be loaded in for every page hit. Yuck!
It doesn't scale very well, it is hard to maintain, and being purely interpreted, it difficult to debug (e.g. syntax errors aren't picked up until you execute the given line).
Unless you are very disciplined and limit the php pages to very presentation-level stuff, you end up with something that is harder to understand and maintain than even c (because it doesn't have the flexibility of it), with none of the advantages (even simple bugs cause the interpreter to bomb with an obscure error message, and it is very slow).
As stated elsewhere, Java servlets are easier to write, easier to maintain, and scale much much better. The problem on Linux is finding a decent vm for it.
ASP/PHP has its place, it just seems to get overused. We use it in 2 web applications, and in hindsight, it wasn't a wise choice for either.
NotZed
PS The bit about the GPL license in the FAQ I just find bizarre.
Re:The most obvious is.. (Score:1)
Re:Zope is better! (Score:3)
"linux is better" -- redundant -1
"freebsd is better" -- flamebait -1 (unless accompanied by well reasoned argument, and at least acknowledging places where linux is better, like SMP, drivers, and scheduling latency and jitter, in which case Informative +1).
"WinNT is better" -- flamebait -1
"Win98 is better" -- no moderation, since people are laughing to hard to select from the list and click the button.
PHP needs CORBA bindings (Score:1)
I guess the ORB to use would be ORBit.
Re:An addition to PHP I'd love to see (Score:3)
Re:The comp.lang.* flamewars of the 21st century (Score:1)
Different beast (Score:2)
From what I know, Zope is suited for large to very large projects, with well-defined standard site structure, while using it for small project could be a great over-kill. Also a concern is that it's way slower - just because of a complication involved.
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:1)
On the other hand you could presumably fork off your own version from PHP3 released only under GPL but:
a) You'd have to work pretty hard to keep/catch up with PHP4
b) Unless you are providing some serious improvements your version would offer nothing over the official version.
c) People are likely to think you are a bit of a pillock.
Re:What does PHP stand for? (Score:1)
Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP (Score:5)
DBI is database interface independent
PHP not
Bingo. This IMO is the biggest problem that needs to be solved with PHP. It supports a wide variety of databases with APIs that are very similar in function, but they're all different. We do a lot of work with MySQL and Oracle around here, and with Perl/DBI you can often go from one to the other with no changes at all (except the connection string). It couldn't possibly be easier.
Something like DBI could probably be done in PHP. It would be an enormous advantage.
Great Perl Module (DBI, CGI, IRC, FTP,
Few library un PHP [sic]
That's not true. The standard distribution in PHP has far more libraries than I'll ever need. To be sure, it's not nearly as big as CPAN, but as you pointed out, Perl is more general purpose than PHP. And note that you don't need something like the CGI.pm module (an HTML-generating library) in PHP. You're programming right into the HTML file anyway, that's the whole point.
Re:An addition to PHP I'd love to see (Score:3)
Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP (Score:1)
--
Simon
Re:PHP or ASP, not the best. (Score:1)
Good programmers produce good code. Bad programmers produce bad code. It's as simple as that.
--
Simon.
slightly off topic (Score:2)
"Error 8000AFDZ"
???
WTF
I'm using ASP with JScript. Decent error messages are enough to win me over to PHP. (Not too mention the fact that PHP has docs which are not "a complete work of fiction", and the fact that you don't need to cough up money for 3rd party plugins to do the most simple stuff.)
Go PHP!
ok I'll stop ranting now.
--
Simon
Who is busting for PHP4.
pr31 r00lZ nd vRy7h33nG 7$3 $uCk$ (Score:1)
QPL and patches (Score:2)
AND
Any modifications you make must be distributed as a seperate patch file.
The first clause doesn't seem to cause the community any difficulty (so some people can sell it big deal)! However the second clause is very bothersome. Suppose KDE or PHP really catch on and people decide to improve/extend the base libraries. These products could still be around and kicking 10-15 years from now just like X is. But by that point the liscensing companies may very well have faded from the picture.
This leaves us with a huge bloated mess of patch files at the core of an expanding system making it difficult to work with. Now I understand the desire of the company to keep their product name undiluted and to recieve patches so perhaps the minor modification that the patches must be made availible on request (you can always go back and diff it) but the modified source may be distributed UNDER A DIFFERNT NAME!!
Small modification but it could make a big difference in the longterm future of some products.
PHP4 + Sessions (Score:1)
People Hate Perl... (Score:2)
(old joke)
--------------------------------
Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP (Score:2)
There are two things that I really miss in php, as you pointed out, DBI rocks. And the second thing is that the regex implementation in php3 is useless (more or less). The array and hash types in php3 is lacking the beauty of the perl version.
Otherwise I kind of like php3 , it's really "easy-to-use", and supports the most stuff you would like to do in a web application. You get results fast and easy.
The biggest disadvantage of perl is that is harder to get started in, it's to much of a "smorgasbord", you don't know what to pick and when you get started your plate is full before you get to the really good parts.
BUT, if you are a profesional staff with time. knowledge and experience building something big that is suposed to be extendable, maintainable and contain all the bells and whistles I would suggest to go for perl. Take a look at mod_perl and all the zilions of addons that is available and you will understand why.
Actually... (Score:1)
That's probably what I'll stick with for the time being, as I am uncomfortable with the new license.
Too bad the Zend people are horking things up for everyone.
Re:The most obvious is.. (Score:1)
OK... if you're feeling is that way, would you embrace a linux port of something like Cold Fusion ahead of php4?
FYI, Allaire will be shipping Cold Fusion for Linux in Q1 2000.
Shameless plug (Score:2)
Re:The most obvious is.. (Score:1)
Erm...even PHP 3 was a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion is. My experiences with ColdFusion have been less than stellar -- incorrect implementationsof simple operators like MOD, no ability to write functions(!?), reusable design only with great pains. (Of course, PHP is no panacea for good design, but CF is far worse.) And as far as I can tell, Allaire has little interest in making ColdFusion a solid, stable product -- only in marketing it as such.
Why is this a competition?! (Score:1)
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:2)
What about Embperl!!! (Score:1)
Just my $0.02
The CONCEPT of PHP, ASP not the best! (Score:1)
As a code-in-HTML system, PHP rocks over ASP. No doubt. If that's what you want.
While you CAN create complex, rich applications with those systems... They DO get hard to maintain and modify, and VERY hard to retool the user interface. And they throw monkey wrenches into the mix of task delegation between application developers, UI developers (i.e. HTML coders), and designers.
That's why I love Zope, and that's why I'm writing a competitor to it in Perl called Iaijutsu [ninjacode.com]. I want the logic separated completely from presentation and to minimize the impact of changes on one from the other.
For a quick example: Can you do 'skins' with your web application in PHP? In other words, completely swap out the look-and-feel for another without touching any Perl/PHP/ASP/Python code? Iaijutsu [ninjacode.com] can, because it uses a template system where the Perl code supplies a set of data to an HTML-like template language. Separation of logic from presentation.
If you don't like skins, then... can you instantly change the entire graphic design of your site using only graphic designers and HTML production artists when the Client sneezes? I, as the application developer, don't want to stay the weekend if it's only because I have to make sure my PHP code in the HTML doesn't break.
So, while PHP is great, compared to other HTML-and-code development environments, I hate the whole concept. I'm thinking as the web is maturing, it's turing more into an application environment.
If you're coming from an HTML-oriented standpoint, trying to make those pages do something, then PHP seems like the dog's tuxedo. But if you're coming from an application-oriented standpoint, thinking about your data and your functionality, and the window dressing later... the code-in-HTML concept does not make that easier.
Agreed... (Score:1)
If you have a job...that pays well...and have toys, does that make you more "right" than anyone else?..that also has a job, money and toys?
Re:PHP4 + Sessions (Score:1)
Re:QPL and patches (Score:2)
Hello,
Pleaes read the interview a little more carefully. QPL license applies only to Zend engine when it's separate from PHP and when someone wants to use it for another application.
Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP (Score:1)
As of PHP 3.0.9+ and PHP 4 you can use Perl compatible regular expressions.
Re:If you like to maintain 4 zillion scripts... (Score:1)
Re:The CONCEPT of PHP, ASP not the best! (Score:1)
Sounds sorta like XSLT, but the other way around Have you considered the XSLT approach?
FWIW, XSLT was upgraded from working draft to recommendation very recently
Re:What about Java? (Score:2)
Apart from that, the Java Serverlet doing all the processing on the server and just sending a generated web page back to the browser (or info back to the applet) is much more elegant and offers better control.
Just my 2 cents Cdn...
Feel free to disagree.
Re:PHP is a direct copy of ASP (Score:1)
As for the PHP is not GPL'ed beef that some of you have. Neither is Apache, FreeBSD and all sorts of other stuff. What is the problem?
-Rasmus
Re:behold, the power of PHP (Score:1)
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:1)
-Rasmus
Re:What about Embperl!!! (Score:1)
Not that I personally think that Embperl itself is worse than PHP. It's just the installation that makes PHP so much easier to start with.
------------------
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:2)
right...and the PHP License requires you to get permission to redistribute php or works derived from it. so...isnt that kinda contradictory to the GPL?
or maybe its only contradictory if both licenses are taken to be "active". the licensing page does say to pick *ONE* license. i guess that would clear things up.
--Siva (doh...licenSe, not licence)
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I have to agree with Rasmus... (Score:2)
Re:php[34] licencing confusion (Score:1)
So, your spelling of the word 'licensing' is correct, but not 'license'. The word is spelled 'licence'.
Hamish
Re:slightly off topic (Score:1)
A PHP-lovin' site to check out... (Score:2)
One of the best examples I can think of is my Totally Free Sample Library, which can be accessed here:
http://www.samplelibrary.net/
We developed this site using totally free tools, and it's a shining example of the power and flexibility of the PHP/Apache combo.
The most difficulty I have with Apache/PHP though is explaining to my clients that yes, in fact, this amazingly powerful platform that I want to use for their projects *is* free, and it is fundamentally a better choice than IIS/ASP for all of their work. They just can't believe it.
Then I show them what we've done with SLN, and it's pretty much a done deal...
If you have 4 months for your project (Score:1)
I chose php for my project instead and was very pleased.
PHP _can_ be used for large projects! (Score:2)
I wrote almost all the code for Catalyst Recruiting [catalystrecruiting.com] - a site that helps small, startup, and nonprofit companies find top college students to hire. It's not a gargantuan site, but it handles a fair amount of traffic with a high degree of customization and 99% dynamic content. It was built entirely on Linux using PHP3 and MySQL in roughly two months.
Now, PHP3 has some limitations, and it's OOP model leaves something to be desired, but I have found that it makes it pretty easy to use objects to abstract away the interface from the logic of the program. This enables me to work pretty seamlessly with several design people who don't know PHP from their own ASP.
Of coures, when PHP4/Zend hits, hold on to your hats. Not only will our site be able to render pages with almost the same speed as static content, but the expanded object model will really make life easier.
PHP is a great language for rapid deployment of custom software. I'm so pleased with it, that I'm thinking of open-sourcing the Catalyst software as an add-on to either PHP or PHPLIB. Anyone think that'd be a good or bad idea?
Eric
Great article (Score:1)
Re:If you like to maintain 4 zillion scripts... (Score:1)
Re:Agreed... (Score:1)
I am a ColdFusion developer...it just happens to be what I am using now. I have friends who are PHP (and a number of other platforms) developers. We are all making a good living developing with our tools of choice.
Maybe rather than fighting over which platform is "best", we could work on ways to make them interoperate...so that those who use a "lesser" platform can still do work with/for those that are using a "greater" one. It's really the data that matters...the rest is just for display.
Check out WDDX [wddx.org]...makes it a lot easier to "syndicate" your data...(reasonably) platform independent.
Re:The most obvious is.. (Score:1)
As far as MOD not inplemented correctly...can you give an example? Works for me just fine.
As far as functions, Allaire took a slightly different path...not quite intuitive to those used to structured programming, but their custom tag implementation works very well...and is quite reusable.
That said, it really makes no difference to me what platform someone else finds best...cause we all know that the platform we are most familiar with tends to be the "best"...at least in our own minds.
PHP is great, CF is great, Perl is great...it just depends on who is using them...and what they have built (or will build) with them.
Re:Comment (Score:2)
Re:Spelling corrections (Score:1)
How ironic that the word should stem from a word meaning freedom! I suppose that licen[cs]es outside the context of software are often more like 'permits' than legal agreements designed to restrict one's freedom.
Hamish
Re:PHP4 + Sessions (Score:1)
Well, the variables are not transmistted in plain text of course.
PHP 4.0 sessions do not store all global variables, because this would create many problem cases. Just imagine that you have an instantiated class. The session module will serialize it, and will try to reinstantiate it, but the current script does not contain the class definition.
I agree too, but I find the way to register session variables overly complex and confusing in PHP4. Something like a single function register($var1,$var2,$var3,) would be neat.
Re:Perl/DBI vs PHP (Score:1)
Re:PHP is a direct copy of ASP (Score:1)
As a long time user (1.x) of PHP, I've never had reason to even look at ASP. Sure, DBI/DBD would be nice, and I think we'll see it soon. Many developers are working on similar things right now. As they get more mature, I'm sure they'll become part of the core PHP product.
Randy
Re:The most obvious is.. (Score:2)
Well, the docs say that the result of MOD has the sign of the divisor. This makes sense. However, the result of -3 mod 7 is returned as -3. I ran into this when trying to do day-of-the-week calcuations.
I know about the custom tags -- they don't help when you want to do evalution in the place where you can use built in functions. For example, you can write:
<CFSET foo = StructFind( bar, baz )>
But not:
<FSET foo = MyFunction( bar )>
Furthermore, custom tags can't return values, unless you play silly games with variable names and scopes that really smells like a hack to me. The reusability they provide is at best adequate, I've found.
I'll agree that CF has it's place -- it works as a good "plug-dynamic-values-in-here" engine. But I really can't recommend it for functions that involve more than a very small amount of complexity.
Anyway...I could rant for a while about ColdFusion, and so could some of my co-workers. We've done some pretty hairy projects with it, and in the end, have determined that it really wasn't worth it. I'll stand by the statement that anything that can be done in ColdFusion can be done as easily, as stably, and as quickly by PHP. Not to mention, less expensively, and free-as-in-speech-ly. Which is why I say PHP is a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion.