PHP 5.1 introduces (finally) a single set of functions for database access, regardless of the database used. No more mucking about with those horrible PEAR classes. SitePoint’s PHP Blog asks: “Could this be the killer feature that draws developers to PHP 5.1 when real-world adoption of PHP 5 is still lagging?” Perhaps, but not for me. I’m still quite happy with PHP4.x. I’ll consider adopting PHP 5 in a year (or two). I guess I fall in the “conservative” camp, not the early adopter camp. Here’s the thing: there is nothing I can’t do in PHP4 right now that makes the learning curve for 5 worth it. And I use libraries that are PHP4. I am a conservative coder. Wait. I’m not really a coder. I’m someone who codes because he has to and can’t afford to hire a real coder. I code because I want to build cool stuff, and you need code for that. I am a coder by necessity.
I am also a bad coder, but good enough to get the job done. I used to code professionally. That company went down. (No correlation there, I believe.) Now, I still code pretty much the same way I did back then, and it works. I use a few libraries for the hard stuff. I use templates. I use SQL. Good enough for most apps. I fool myself that the vision and things like UI and usability make up for my lack of coding skill.s I’ll shut up now. Damn coffee.
June 22nd, 2005 at 8:56 am
You know what. Once I actually finally sit down and learn proper objects, I might move. No point in sticking with PHP4 nasty objects.
June 22nd, 2005 at 7:07 pm
Yeah, that’s the main reason to move to PHP4. Object oriented programming is sort of the way I’ve come to think about things now. For instance, for Mediafeedr (laucnhing in a few days), every item of data is wrapped in an object and all database access is hidden behind that. It makes it nice because I should be able to port it to a different database backend easily and I’ll be able to easily optimize my queries for each database engine. If I was using PHP5 I could use inheritance and save myself a buttload of copy and paste code in my backend objects.
If you think about it, everything you access can be thought of as an object. I have users, feeds, and urls and objects to map all of those to one another. It doesn’t matter whether they’re stored in memory or in SQL or a flat text file, the object looks the same. Just a better way to program I think.
But I agree, I’m not moving to PHP5 until it’s been out a while. I’m still running across weird bugs in PHP 4.3.