PHP 4.0: Dynamic Content for the Web Warrior
PHP 4: A Vast Improvement

Paul Ferris
Thursday, May 25, 2000 02:28:29 PM
If you've been cruising the net, looking for the latest and greatest things,
you often come across vaporware technologies, and promises that are made
and broken. You might find yourself imagining things, like over-hyped
proprietary products coming down the pike, where the choices had been open
in the past.
The world has changed overnight, in case you've blinked.
If you came late to the PHP Party, don't worry--there's plenty of
reasons to celebrate. PHP is an Open Source server-side scripting language
for creating dynamic web content, in place on some 1.5 million Web sites
worldwide--and growing. There's a new version of PHP out, version 4.0.
I just got around to downloading and giving it a whirl.
PHP 4.0 is not a trivial upgrade to an existing product--it's a total
re-write with backward compatibility to the 3.x technology.
That's actually quite a feat, because they kept the compatibility with
version 3.x while making some radical changes under the hood.
First and foremost, the 3.x product was really an interpreted
language, each line of code evaluated during the execution of the
server side page.
With version 4.0, the functional difference is actually quite staggering--the server actually compiles the code on the fly, and then executes the
code, with dramatic improvements in speed, as you can guess.
There's actually more to it than this. Zend
Technologies now provides an optimizer (not a
free product, by the way--they have to make a
living somehow) for people who have created
massive PHP projects and want to create more
efficient code bases.
And if that's not
enough, PHP has been separated completely from
Apache, so that the language itself can be
embedded into other products that need scripting
languages. This is absolutely awesome news, as
far as I'm concerned. Possibly even bigger news
than PHP 4.0 itself.
I've come to enjoy
coding in PHP a lot. I've found its syntax is
very consistent and its ability to hide gory
programming details to be extremely pleasant. I
can only hope that the open source projects that lack a good
scripting language will
take this ball and run with it. Imagine all of
your favorite databases running the same
scripting language, one that's pretty easy to
learn and fairly well documented. The
possibilities are endless.
Next: Benchmarking Performance »