Another update to our PHP course - a brief comment about objects in PHP. As I post, the current PHP 5 version is PHP 5.0 Beta 3 ....

PHP 5 (which has been under test for around 6 months - January 2004) - includes a much enhanced object model which is much more like the object model in Java.  Once PHP 5 is released, we don't expect to see a rush by all system administrators to upgrade from PHP4, so you should be careful not to start coding with the new object facilities until you're certain that your web server, and any other web servers that you code will run on, will support it.  Early uses of the new facilities will be charcterised as new large applications which will be developed and tested over a period of months by a team of programmers ... that's the sort of application that object techniques are ideal for, and also the type of application for which the development team has control of its own server rather than relying on an ISP.


Do you have in mind a migrating to PHP5 from PHP4 course?

jfp

I'll certainly have a server running PHP5 (currently at Beta 3) running for the next public course, but while it remains a Beta release that won't be the main server ...

It's surprising how slowly folks upgrade; the vocal minority will shout a lot about PHP5, but we'll find that most of our customers are running bundled / older versions for quite a while ... how often do you upgrade your webserver?   If PHP5 takes a while to make significant inroads, we'll add sections to the notes where appropriate to describe the PHP5 "way", then gradually move them more centre stage as PHP 4 starts to fade - easy for us to do as we print our manuals fresh for every course.

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