I recently read a very good post at jero.net which talks about what I might be able to expect from PHP version 6. A lot of it seems exciting, but not exciting enough.

PHP is such an easy language to pick up that many PHP programmers don’t spend enough time picking up good habits, and end up writing bad code. From what I’ve been able to gather from Jero’s comments, PHP 6 will help developers loose at least a few of some old bad habits. This is a welcomed change.

I think PHP 6 should increase its object-oriented programming model. It would be nice to have return type hinting, and to be able to do parameter type hinting with primitive types.

Also, I would like to see object-oriented programming methods used with some of the core PHP functions. For example, it would be nice if some functions threw exceptions instead of errors or warnings. I think catching an exception is a lot better than trying to deal with the “@” operator and dealing with various errors.

PHP 5 is being slow to catch on. I think that is mostly because Linux distributions have been slow to include PHP 5 and many server environments are even slower to upgrade their systems from something that has been working and tested. If I remember right, PHP 4 was also slow to catch on. If PHP 6 comes out soon, I think we will see many people make a slow, eventual switch from version 4 directly to version 6. If PHP 6 comes out later rather than sooner, I think we will see at that point that most people have made a switch to version 5, and we will again see a very slow adoption period for the latest version.

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Before I start though, I thought that I would express concern over how easy coldfusion seems. I am curious to know if the simplicity of coldfusion code (as I’ve seen in the Macromedia examples) limits in any way its abilities or functionality.

But now the reasons why we will continue working with PHP. The first, is that PHP is free and widely available. While spending the money on commerical products that works is not a big concern, using free software has some good benefits.

First, is that there are a lot of free packages and applications available for PHP that are only available because PHP is not a commerical application. These include blogging software, forum software, lots of database connectabiltiy, packages to assist in caching and cachemanagement, packages for an embedded wiki engine, templating engines, and so on and so on.

Free software also has the added advantage that more people have better exposure to it. When we hire students to do the programmming, who are constantly coming and going, it can be difficult to train them on new technologies. Therefore, it is important that we use technologies that they are already familar with. I see a lot more resumes with PHP on them, then I do with Coldfusion on them.

Even for the students who are hired with little PHP experience, it is easier to train them, I beleive, on PHP as long as they already have some general programming experience. Coldfusion may be easier to pick up for those who are mainly web designers, but I think PHP is easier to pick up for programmers. At BYU, there are a lot more programmers than those who are limited to web design.

The fact that PHP is easy to learn, is also why our attempt to use Java failed, not because Java isn’t easy to learn, but the whole Java web framework was confusing and difficult to understand how to get started. Even for those who know Java, knowing how to use it in a web environment was difficult to understand for us.

There seems to be a lot more documentation on the web for PHP than there is for coldfusion. Which means the students we hire who are not PHP experts, are more likely to find help with what they are doing on the internet with various online documentation sites.

Our student employees are also free to install and play around with PHP on just about any computer. On their mac, or home windows station, or whereever. The can experiment on their own without having to have access to an expensive production server.

So we will keep using PHP, just because it is easier to learn for our employees and requires less training. In corporate environments Coldfusion may be a good choice, but PHP is our choice, because we have a high turnover of students that we need something a little more common.

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Then many people can implement the interfaces for many different things. When one implements an interface, they create a class that fulfils all the definitions defined in the interface. This way, developers can implement interfaces when they program classes for things. That way, people can exchange and interchange classes which impliment the same interface.

Let me give an example. There are many ways of implementing authentication for an application. Some will use ldap, others will look users up in a database, while others may use another kind of service from a server. Each authentication method can be written as an class with object oriented programming methods. Now lets say there is an interface that says there needs to be a method called login($username, $password). If each of the different authentication classes contain a method called login($username, $password), then it doesn’t matter to the rest of the application what class is used, because they all contain the required login method.

If PEAR writes and provides interfaces, developers can write their classes to implement the interfaces, then application developers can choose or re-choose from a variety of implementing classes without having to change their underlying code. This would be an incredible advantage in PHP development.

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