Comments for The PHP Grind

Comment on Death of the Back Button by gcornelisse

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:40:20 +0000

I’ll take a look. I’d be interested in seeing if it can handle application level history. It isn’t so much that the Back button doesn’t work. Its more so that the Back button sends you back farther than you expected. This happen because you’re basically running a mini-application on one *page*. For instance a feed reader or email client. I click to read a couple messages, and expect the Back button to let me navigate back through the messages I clicked and read. The reality is that I never actually left the page. Everything happened in the browser without changing the URL. Therefore, the Back button was useless in this scenario. A scenario that happens more often now that we use more JS UI tools and load our data with AJAX calls.

Comment on Death of the Back Button by kevinkevin

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:12:32 +0000

Hey saw this and had a thought for you - lucky you right…

I occasionally use YUI for some js tasks and on thing I noticed they had which *may* assist you is the history manager. I believe they use it in conjucntion with the client side pagination. This history manager seems to allow you to access the back button.

maybe that is a place to look for a solution??

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by » Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5!

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:13:29 +0000

[...] Page Summary: I have experiece this with 3 language personnally and probably could find evidence of it for other. It does help to a degree but not enough to make a difference. PHP will have many years to come a first rate development language but it will have to drag itself through the debris of its own flaws and myths. The only salvation is if something radical happens in some aspect of the language that draws the early adopter back to the fold.read more | digg story [...]

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by BitRatchet » Blog Archive » PHP 5 discussion end in Steel Cage Rant

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 06:25:00 +0000

[…] I was googling around and found some people’s thots on migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5. One point I didn’t see in the original post here was that PHP 4 and MySQL 5 are not present in long-term-supported distributions of Linux like RHEL4. Sometimes the Linux distro is pretty important in terms of software version choice. […]

Comment on Scott Johnson’s Blog: Podcast : PHP Theory 1 by fuzzygroup

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 10:36:17 +0000

Hey there,

Thanks for the link. I’d curious to know what you think about it. If I get good feedback on this one I’ll make coverage of best practices a regular thing. Might be interesting.

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by gcornelisse

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:37:51 +0000

PHP4 and PHP5 comparison/migration information: Changes in PHP 5/Zend Engine II Classes and Objects (PHP 5) Classes and Objects (PHP 4) Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 What's New in PHP 5

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by ruzz

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 07:09:19 +0000

i think it might be helpful to point out ASP.NET is not a language, it is a development framework/platform. A very solid one, but still it’s like comparing raw php development to rails it’s not accurate, nor fair.

Like Rails, which sits on top of the “language” ruby, asp sits on top of the pie known as .NET. The discussion here about upgrading to PHP 5 from 4 would be more suited if looked at through the lens of upgrading from .net 1.1 to .net 2.0, but even that isn’t accurate, it just underlines the point.

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by dasil003

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 01:33:26 +0000

I agree that PHP developers need to get on the PHP 5 bandwagon. PHP 5 has a lot of compelling features, but it’s hard to make the switch if you’re depending on open source apps that don’t support it yet. However the last line of your article is particularly telling for me.

I’ve been in the PHP game professionally for 6 years. I’ve probably written more PHP code than any other language. Over that time I’ve become comfortable in PHP, but also increasingly annoyed with its little foibles. Little things like magic_quotes_gpc and register_globals are easy to work around, but over time make me ask the question: Why should I have to do deal with this? I’m still looking up the order of haystack needle after 6 years. Other PHP4 issues like wonky references, extremely simplistic OOP support, lack of sensible error handling, no namespaces, and other small annoyances have seemed like more and more of a hindrance as my understanding of web applications has increased.

Perhaps an even bigger problem is the proliferation of shitty PHP code out there. All languages have bad code, but PHP seems to have some of the worst outside of the Visual Basic / Consumer IDE realm. OSCommerce is a great example. The first response suggested trying to help them, but that’s a fool’s errand. Without the rest of the developers getting behind the effort, there is no way to make a dent in the morass of code by submitting patches. That’s why ZenCart forked, but believe me that codebase is not so great either. Part of the problem is that PHP is so easy to get into, you have new programmers taking it up all the time, copying bad practices from hotscripts.

PHP 5 and 6 are making huge improvements to the language, but now that we’re at the top of the PHP adoption bell-curve these improvements are going to take years and years to trickle down to all the libraries and scripts. As far as I’m concerned its simply too little too late to compete with languages that had strong design philosophies from their inception. PHP is still second-to-none for hosting and easy deployment, and I expect it to stay that way for years if not decades. I will continue to use PHP for small projects. I’m looking forward to PHP 6 and the incremental improvements it makes. However for larger projects I don’t think PHP can ever match the flexibility and power of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, or Seaside. It’s the expressiveness of languages like Ruby, Python and Smalltalk that make those frameworks work so well while PHP frameworks tend to be unwieldy and get in your way.

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by mgkimsal

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:13:59 +0000

yes gcornelisse, the net makes things a small world. I was googling for you today and came across this site.

Comment on Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5! by karl

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:50:59 +0000

As an ASP.NET guy, I’ve advocated that ASP.NET isn’t always the right tool for the right job. Specifically, ASP.NET is wonderfully aimed at enterprise development as well as various medium to large scale projects. PHP, as a toolset, is better positioned to address a different problem space. While I too am generally apathetic towards those unwilling to learn and evolve, there a reality out there that isn’t as straightforward. PHP5 isn’t in the same universe as ASP.NET when it comes to enterprise development. I don’t know _anything_ about PHP6, but I’m positive that nothing short of a total redesign has a chance of making it competitive (FOR THAT PARTICULAR TYPE OF DEVELOPMENT). It’s possible that PHP6 is a complete redesign, like ASP.NET was to ASP and VB.NET to VB6, but it’s important to understand downside of that.
If you aren’t building the type of sites/applications that ASP.NET/.NET are well suited for, you are far better off using PHP or other similar tools. Otherwise you’ll end up with horrible code that’s as unmaintainable, buggy and slow.
The point I’m trying to make is to be careful what you ask for. PHP is positioned to capture a very healthy “market share”. It does what it does very well. The more you ask of it to do something else, the more you’ll abandon your faithful core group. Microsoft made that choice with ASP.NET and because of it, the ASP.NET team had to spend most of the 2.0 lifecycle trying to bridge the huge classic ASP gap they created. The VB team is in the same boat. It’s actually surprisingly ballsy and uncharacteristic of Microsoft (long history of backwards compatibility).
I will admit that it’s certainly possible for both PHP and ASP.NET to find a happy home across multiple types of development. PHP5 does do a good job of starting to introduce some important enterprise level methodologies while making it possible for anyone to completely ignore those to “setup a gallery”. As I’ve already said, ASP.NET 2.0 has done a lot to soften the learning curve. But it’s a hard balancing act that requires a well thought out roadmap and amazing execution. I have no doubt that PHP will make it happen, but I’m sorry to say, it’ll take some time – that’s something I’ve only recently come to terms with in my own development world.