PHP Programming :: Lets Talk

[Shakeel Shrestha]

Friends, lets talk about php programming in this forum section.

[Aashis Binod Khanal]

OK lets really talk about PHP---moving to PHP-6


As you may be aware the core PHP group of developers all met in Paris on November the 11th and 12th 2005. The minutes from the meeting are fascinating reading, but there is a lot to go through. So I've gone through all of the points raised and chewed them over from a developers point of view. Your comments as always are welcome.

Before I get started however I'd just like to make one thing very clear: what you read here (or in the original minutes) are in no way the 'fully 100% decided' end results / changes that we'll see in PHP6. They will most likely all be discussed further (on internals and wider), but even so we can take the information presented in the minutes as being the PHP teams most 'current' way of thinking about any given subject.

Unicode

Unicode support at present can be set on a per request basis. This equates to PHP having to store both Unicode and non-Unicode variants of class, method and function names in the symbol tables. In short - it uses up more resources. Their decision is to make the Unicode setting server wide, not request wide. Turning Unicode off where not required can help performance and they quote some string functions as being up to 300% slower and whole applications 25% slower as a result. The decision to move it to the php.ini in my mind does take the control away from the user, and puts it into the hands of the Web Host.

If you compile PHP yourself or are responsible for this on your servers then you may be interested to know that PHP 6 will require the ICU libs (regardless if Unicode is turned on or off). The build system will bail out if the required ICU libs cannot be found. In a nutshell, you'll have another thing to install if you want to compile PHP.

Register Globals to go

Say goodbye folks, this one is finally going. It will no longer be an ini file setting, and if found it will raise an E_CORE_ERROR, pointing you to the documentation on why it's "bad". This means that PHP6 will finally break all PHP3 era scripts (or any script using reg globals) with no recourse at all but to re-code it. That's a bold move, but a needed one.

Magic Quotes to go

The magic quotes feature of PHP will be going, and as with register globals it's going to raise an E_CORE_ERROR if the setting is found anywhere. This will affect magic_quotes, magic_quotes_sybase and magic_quotes_gpc.

Safe Mode to go

This may please developers who have web hosts that insist upon safe mode! But it will now go totally, again raising an E_CORE_ERROR if found. The reason is that apparently they felt it gave the 'wrong signal', implying that it made PHP secure, when infact it didn't at all. open_basedir will (thankfully) be kept.

'var' to alias 'public'

PHP4 used 'var' within classes. PHP5 (in its OO move) caused this to raise a warning under E_STRICT. This warning will be removed in PHP6 and instead 'var' will mean the same thing as 'public'. This is a nice move but I if anyone has updated their scripts to work under E_STRICT in PHP5 it will be a redundant one for them.

Return by Reference will error

Both '$foo =& new StdClass()' and 'function &foo' will now raise an E_STRICT error.

zend.ze1 compatbility mode to go

ze1 always tried to retain old PHP4 behaviour, but apparently it "doesn't work 100%" anyway, so it will be removed totally and throw an E_CORE_ERROR if detected.

Freetype 1 and GD 1 support to go

Support for both of these (very very old) libs will be removed.

dl() moves to SAPI only

Each SAPI will register the use of this function as required, only the CLI and embed SAPIs will do this from now on. It will not be available elsewhere.

FastCGI always on

The FastCGI code will be cleaned up and always enabled for the CGI SAPI, it will not be able to be disabled.

Register Long Arrays to go

Remember the HTTP_*_VARS globals from yesteryear? Well if you're not already using $_GET, $_POST, etc - start doing so now, because the option to enable