Hi,
(CC'ing Lukas, since he is a DB pro. ;-))
On 6/18/07, Matt Barnicle mattb@wageslavery.org wrote:
we were just pondering how many of you still rely on PHP4 support since we'd make life easier and drop it on devel-vnext completely. Same goes for our DB logic, MDB2 is very mature currently - should we rely on it exclusively?
Thoughts? Comments? Feedback?
Hi everyone.. I haven't posted before, I just have a few lists that I follow the dev discussion on for a few reasons, and this is one of them. I'm also on the squirrelmail-dev list, and right now the same discussion is going on. It started with a post by a developer of the Drupal project and has gone from there. I encourage everyone interested to read through that thread as they explore this idea in some more detail:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.squirrelmail.devel/8644
I personally think it's a good idea to move forward and use PHP5. Really, the main reason PHP5 apps aren't being built is just because of that one thing that people are mentioning, their host doesn't have it installed. But if they had an incentive to upgrade, they would. I personally think this mentality is hindering progress, but I also respect others' viewpoints on the matter.
Thanks for sharing this - I feel the same.
@Bob: Thanks also! PDO really is worth considering. So even though I like MDB2 a lot, if we go PHP5 we should probably go completely and not drag along PHP4-compatible code. And if one doesn't like pure PDO mabye Creole, Doctrine, or whatever. But I haven't used any of those (only PDO through Zend_Db/Zend_Db_*).
The move to apache2 has been compared, and I think that's another example where the move should be done. It has support for threading, so when a new request comes in, an entire server process doesn't have to be forked! What a tremendous potential resource savings if all hosts were to just switch... That's just one example, there are lots more..
All in all, I know people are sceptical (of the sceptical) but I feel like PHP5 has a lot to add for us. Which is also why like frameworks like Zend Framework, Symfony or Prado are PHP5 only.
All things aside - "devel-vnext" is not gonna be released tomorrow, so maybe we should start to build PHP5-only (with PHP6 in mind) and slowly but surely get you PHP4-people interested. :-)
Food for thoughts.
Good night, Till