Wed 2 Mar 2005
Why upgrade to PHP5?
Posted by Joe under Random Thoughts , Software, Hardware and stuff , Web development and design1 Comment
I’ve just found the first reason I would want to migrate to PHP5. I’m not a great programmer. I learnt BASIC as a 9 year old playing with ZX81 and Commodore 64s. I don’t care about better OO support and all that stuff that appears to have been built in to PHP5, I just want a nice simple interpreted language. PHP4 works and I am a great believer (probably out of laziness) that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The reason I would seriously consider migrating is SimpleXML. After reading about Yahoo! Search Web Services and hunting for a nice simple PHP XML Parser I found this tutorial. Like its name suggests, its simple.
The one thing I think that is holding back wider uptake of PHP5 is that most hosts are not getting demand for it from their users. In a commercial environment where you run your own servers it can be much easier to change that to potentially upset 100 hosting customers on a shared box. Most people don’t need it. PHP4 just works.
I would say I shared your oppinion of it not too long ago. After about a week of reading into and toying with Object Oriented and PHP I am asking my self how I lived with out it. If you haven’t made the time to take up OOP in the past and you know php fairly well. Take a few minutes and read a few tutorials its worth its weight in gold. I’m now trying to get my self upgraded to PHP5…
We, the php literate are probably 99.999 percent like you Joe… My story was the same almost zero previous programming experiance and im a complete supporter of conversion to OOP and PHP5 today.
Take 30 minutes and try an example, it will change your life.
Chris