Aaron Wormus talks about his session at ZendCon and Migrating to PHP 5

Aaron Wormus, pictured on the left at PHP Vikinger, (photo courtesy of Sebastian Bergmann) needs no introduction to those who hang out in freenode.net’s #phpc channel. Like everybody else in a chat room who’s title includes the phrase “It is about community, friendship, and farting around” he’s a quick wit and always willing to help out if a question comes up.

Aaron will be presenting at Zend PHP/Conference and Expo this year so I thought it would be fun to talk to him a bit about his presentations. So I called him. Luckily for me, I did this early in the morning CST so I caught him just after his afternoon nap.

Aaron, your presentation is entitled “Moving to PHP5 With Style”. Tell us a little about what people can expect to see.
Actually, I’m doing two sessions, one on the programming track and one on the management track but they are both about migrating to PHP 5. Most of the sessions I’ve been to on migrating to PHP 5 have focused on what it takes to get your PHP 4 code up and running, I’m approaching it form a different angle. I’m going to talk about the new things you can do with your code once you get it into PHP 5. Then in my management track session I will talk about how to manage a PHP 5 upgrade. I’ll talk about resources, milestones, and what things will take longer than others. I’ve managed several upgrades where we’ve taken a code base and migrated from PHP4 up to PHP 5. There are some things that you really have to know about. You have to know which migration points are simple, which can be skipped over, things like that. We’ll focus a lot on what manager can do to make their transition easier.

Beyond just the code aspect of the migration, I’ll also talk about the difference in philosophy between PHP 4 coding and PHP 5 coding. For instance in PHP 5 you may want to start implementing Unit Testing or take advantage of the new object oriented features to make your code more modular. In the management session I will also touch on revision control systems like Subversion.

So tell me, in your opinion, why would a company want to migrate from PHP 4 to PHP 5?
I would say that the best reason to upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5 is that it makes your life much easier when developing web services. Doing things with XML that were really painful in PHP 4 are very easy in PHP 5. Also, you take out a lot of the work that was necessary just to maintain your platform.

Ok, real quick before I let you go, what is your favorite feature of PHP 5?
If I had to pick, I would say that SimpleXML and the support for SOAP. Those two make PHP a great platform for rapid application development.

I’d like to thank Aaron again for his time. You can hear more from Aaron on migrating to PHP 5 in his sessions at Zend PHP/Conference and Expo. If you’ve not yet registered, you can click here to register.

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