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Simon Willison’s Weblog

PHP 5 is out!

It’s finally here! Unfortunately PHP.net, while a great site in most respects, fails miserably when it comes to permalinks for news items and/or new software releases. You can grab it from their downloads page, and read more about it in the changelog. Now all it needs is widespread adoption. Unfortunately, something tells me PHP 4 is going to stick around for a long, long time.

Posted 14th July 2004 at 12:13 am

This is PHP 5 is out! by Simon Willison, posted on 14th July 2004.

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16 comments

  1. As if PHP needs to get any better...! :)

    What can it NOT do?

    Matt - 14th July 2004 01:45 - #

  2. Thank goodness PHP4 is going to stick around for a long, long time. (Meta note: the first tab after this comment box is the link in the spammer note, I was expecting it to be the preview comment button. May want to tweak your tabindex.

    Matt - 14th July 2004 03:12 - #

  3. Is there a scripting language that more closely resembles C++? With a web-library, and without the need to compile? I've often wondered why PHP wasn't just C++ with an interpreter and a web funtion library.

    hemebond - 14th July 2004 03:20 - #

  4. Hemebond, there are PHP compilers and such. Also WebObjects buy Apple I believe closely resembles C++, which it is Java (i think).

    Jacob Ham - 14th July 2004 03:23 - #

  5. I've managed to find an Apache module called Carrot (ROOT-Apache) which uses CINT. However it seems very complicated and, in my noob eyes, more complicated than it actually needs to be.

    hemebond - 14th July 2004 06:47 - #

  6. Excellent! Now all I have to do is persuade management that it really is worth the shift from PHP4 to 5. Oh, and my web host. And my freelance clients, and...

    Bugger. This could take a while.

    Graham Binns - 14th July 2004 08:54 - #

  7. "What can it NOT do?"

    Multi-threaded application servers!

    Hendrik - 14th July 2004 13:04 - #

  8. Why, it will just be a matter of weeks. Same as the Apache 2.x adoption!

    Jan! - 14th July 2004 13:55 - #

  9. "What can it NOT do?"
    Multi-threaded application servers!

    Not so fast: PHP threads extension. I'm not saying use it but...
    Also note Nanoweb - web server written in PHP although uses process forking instead of threading. Nanoweb works well.

    Harry Fuecks - 14th July 2004 15:26 - #

  10. Jacob Ham wrote:

    Also WebObjects buy Apple I believe closely resembles C++, which it is Java (i think).

    WebObjects was originally a set of Objective C (not C++) frameworks for web applications based on and largely extending NeXT's Openstep frameworks. As a framework, it really couldn't resemble C++. WO was rewritten in Java in later versions. The ObjC language followed the Smalltalk programming model rather than the Simula one that C++ inherited, so most similarities you might have noticed are due to both languages being supersets of C (though only ObjC is a strict superset of C)

    I wish WebObjects had a proper scripting language (it did once, WebScript which was based on ObjC) I might still be working with WO if it did.

    Patrick Taylor - 15th July 2004 02:52 - #

  11. What can it NOT do?

    Being Turing-complete it can in principle do anything that other programming languages can. But having said that, amongst other things, PHP4 doesn't have proper destructors (only a somewhat less that useful register_shutdown_function() ) or clean dot-syntax accessors (yes, I know there's a method overloading extension) or method protection or language constructs for monitors (or some other guarantee of exclusivity or atomicity) or...

    Rich - 15th July 2004 22:57 - #

  12. Another thing I'd forgotten: you can't overload or define infix operators. This means, for example, you can't make a complex number class and then naturally say things like a + b or a * b for complex numbers.

    Rich - 15th July 2004 23:06 - #

  13. But having said that, amongst other things, PHP4 doesn't have proper destructors

    PHP 5 has proper destructors.

    or method protection

    You mean protected class methods? PHP 5 has that.

    PHP 5 has made some fundamental changes to the language. I suggest you check it out before talking about what it can and cannot do.

    Jim Dabell - 16th July 2004 00:30 - #

  14. PHP 5 has made some fundamental changes to the language. I suggest you check it out before talking about what it can and cannot do.

    You'll note that I said "PHP4 doesn't...". I know that some of these things have been fixed by PHP5, but my impression from Matt's comments was that he thought that PHP4 was perfectly good enough and didn't need improving at all.

    PHP is one of my favourite languages by the way. Working on a major project in PHP4 was certainly much more pleasant than using C# for another one!

    Rich - 16th July 2004 07:05 - #

  15. If you have suggestions for permalinks, etc. drop us a line to webmaster@php.net :)

    Jacques - 24th July 2004 10:16 - #

  16. I wish MySQL 5 was stable now :)

    Bahadir - 30th July 2004 15:34 - #

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