Gregory Szorc Talks About 'So Many Untapped PHP Features'
Gregory Szorc recently posted a blog entry in which he laments the fact that many big PHP open source projects don’t utilize the features that he thinks are the strengths of PHP. Muc of it can be boiled down to the fact that after 2 years, many big projects are still not embracing PHP 5 and object oriented design.
I love PHP as a language. It can be used for quick and dirty scripts. Or, you can harness the object-oriented features to make a project very structured. I’ve been doing the later almost exclusively for the past two years. The reason? I generally find projects are easier to maintain when functionality is encapsulated in classes. You never know when you might want to duplicate something, right? Its basically the list of benefits of object-oriented programming versus procedural.
It’s a long article but I found int interesting. One cool thing is that in additional to his article, there is a discussion including posts by Bharat Mediratta who claims to be the founder of the Gallery project and one of the Gallery 2 developers. Since Gallery was one of the projects mentioned in the initial article, Bharat took the time to respond.
Comments
Second, in the dotProject forums late last year, I mentioned moving to PHP5 and many threw a fit because their hosting companies don't support it.
Internal to the group, we've been discussing how many features and benefits we're missing simply because of maintaining full PHP4 compatibility. The current thoughts are the the next major release (3.0 from the current 2.1) will be PHP5-only.