Re: Quick Poll: PHP 4 / 5

Hello, on 09/14/2005 01:30 PM Oliver Grätz said the following:

In theory those are the only changes. In practice, besides the officially admitted changes, there are also the bugs that were not yet discovered or fixed.

Examples? Links? More information on this? The fact is that on

http://bugs.php.net/

php.internals there are discussions to reduce the number of maintained development threads. In the not-so-far future they will reduce the manpower put into backporting bugfixes to the PHP4.x development branch since 5.x is the HEAD revision and everything is first fixed there. I

In theory yes, in practice no. As a matter of fact PHP 4.4 was introduced after PHP 5.0, although the "new version, new bugs" is the same.

think all "old" stuff is just as mature in PHP5 as you know it from PHP4 and if some errors are found they are likely to be fixed more quickly for the 5.x release. The "new" stuff (that wasn't there before 5.0) almost certainly has more bugs since it's younger but that's no argument since this isn't relevant for old projects.

Right, that is why most people with old projects will not upgrade to PHP 5.

I think the change from 4 to 5 ist that slow because there are so many programmers with VisualBasic (or worse) background that don't see the benefits of OOP. Iterators and delegation via interceptors are cool

!?!? You can do OOP since PHP 3. PHP 5 OOP improvements are nice but they will not make anybody richer.

The OOP features of PHP3 were nothing more than some kind of crippled

That is not the point. The point is that you said that people using PHP 4 do not see the benefits of OOP, as if they cannot do OOP in PHP 4. The reality is that even in PHP 3 you can use benefit of OOP features such as encapsulation and inheritance. PHP 5 adds more OOP features, some copied from Java and Visual Basic, but that does not mean developers must use PHP 5 to do OOP. It is also curious that you mention Visual Basic as if you could not do OOP in Visual Basic either. Did you know that not only you can do OOP since a long time ago in Visual Basic, but also you can make object variable accesses be implicitly implemented with setter and getter functions like you can now in PHP 5?

As a matter of fact I just read this interesting article named "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security" that demonstrates what I always knew that upgrading to the latest versions is often a bad idea. Read the point #6) Action is Better Than Inaction . http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/

Nice article. Read it myself a few days ago (wasn't the link featured on Slashdot? *g*). Delaying upgrades might be true for running systems. But there's nothing keeping you from running both PHP4 and PHP5 on the same machine for different projects. And if you start a project from scratch PHP5 is the way to go.

In theory yes, in practice nobody starts projects from scratch. Usually you reuse class libraries that are proven and implement many basic function. Many of those class libraries were built for PHP 4, not for PHP 5. Some are complex and large. If you use them in PHP 5 with prior certification chances are that you may stumble in PHP 5 bugs and backwards incompatible changes that make such libraries not work properly. Then even your new projects may be affected. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/ Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html