Re: The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee

On 12/13/2010 8:22 AM, Mike Pavlak wrote:

I am not familiar with the "battle" either. Joe, can you site some references from which you are referring?

You should be familiar with this stuff, Mike, since you're selling it, but evidently not so I'll update you.

PHP4 and PHP5 are "compatible" except where they aren't. In fact, a couple of significant underlying pieces got completely changed. Two big ones are objects, which in PHP4 were passed by value but in PHP5 are passed by reference. Another problem which is minor but just painful as hell is the fact that the classnames in PHP5 are now case sensitive, whereas in PHP4 everything was always converted to lowercase.

There are other similar issues, enough so that lots of PHP4 code didn't run under PHP5. Enough problems existed that for years after the release, people were still recommending PHP4 over PHP5, and a majority of hosting sites were still on PHP4. Years, you say? Well, yeah. PHP5 is now nearly 7 years old. And out there on the Intertubes, lots of the example code for PHP is still PHP4, even though PHP4 was officially discontinued as of the end of 2007.

What's up with PHP6? Well, the move to Unicode didn't go too swimmingly. In fact, it gummed up the works enough that the PHP6 trunk was abandoned. So PHP6 is on indefinite hold while PHP5 continues and the PHP folks decide to come up with a new Unicode strategy. The point is that I'll be interested to see given the slow uptake of PHP5 how many years it takes PHP5 sites to get up to PHP6.

But really, don't take my word for it. Read up on the stuff. Read about PHP6.

My original comment was that if Oracle decides to force a fork on Java, they will turn it into PHP, in which backwards compatibility is not a given (take a look at magic quotes or register globals). The loss of stability may not be as important to a language you use primarily for scripting, but it's a crucial issue with a true enterprise language like Java.

Joe