Just a quick update. (Insert lame excuse for lack of posting here.)
- It’s just over a year since I launched this site. 186 posts later I’m still going.
- Work is busy. Lots of projects.
- I’m presenting at the GOVIS conference in May. Got to finish writing for that.
- Soccer (football for the Europeans) training has started. I’m running the club website, using WordPress as a CMS/news publishing tool. It was easier than hacking/fixing the custom app I’d built for them last year.
- The local BMX track has had some work done on it. It’s heaps quicker now.
- I’m teaching Grace (my 6 year old daughter) to body surf. She still can’t swim, but she’s learning to read the waves. Oscar (my 3 year old son) still get pounded in the shore break.
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.