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PHP 7 Released

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Re: PHP 7 Released

#31

Post by gkwelding »

mrmondo wrote: post #20

As a person with more of an ops background can someone explain to me why / when PHP might be a viable language? My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues and I think that often in the past PHP was often a language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills, it feels like designers have now shifted to using Node for this?

"My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues"

Unfortunately PHP seems to have this reputation. It's not so much the language that is the problem but the people using it. PHP typically had such a low bar to entry that literally anyone could pick it up and do anything and everything with it. And quite frankly there were (and still are) a lot of beginner tutorials out there encouraging people to do very stupid insecure stuff. It now seems to be an image that stuck.

If you take a look at the OWASP Top 10, and any big data breaches recently, they are all caused by human error. SQL injection being the major culprit.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#32

Post by gaius »

mrmondo wrote: post #20

As a person with more of an ops background can someone explain to me why / when PHP might be a viable language? My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues and I think that often in the past PHP was often a language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills, it feels like designers have now shifted to using Node for this?

language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills

A history lesson: PHP was originally known as PHP/FI which meant "personal home page form interpreter". That people started using it for "real work" took everyone by surprise, including the author!

http://php.net/manual/phpfi2.php#history

Re: PHP 7 Released

#34

Post by Kartificial »

longwave wrote: post #19

The performance improvements in this release will hopefully encourage people to upgrade, even if the new features don't. Common PHP applications run 70%-100% faster on PHP 7 than they did on PHP 5.6, comparable with or better than HHVM.

That sounds amazing, do you have any sources / benchmarks to back this up?

Re: PHP 7 Released

#35

Post by mtbcoder »

defenestration wrote: post #17

Congratulations to the PHP community with this milestone! I wonder if people who switched to HHVM, will start using PHP again. HHVM has offered much faster performance than previous versions of PHP. The speed of PHP 7 is at par with HHVM.

I may be wrong, but I would assume most teams/individuals who made the decision to implement HHVM did so to use Hack and all of its features.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#36

Post by aikah »

trm42 wrote: post #7

PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o/ http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month an…

> I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.

There is some middle ground good practice which is using PDO, or even better Doctrine/DBAL . I don't think Laravel's ORM is that good, and the Active Record Pattern is somehow controversial.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#37

Post by monk_e_boy »

egeozcan wrote: post #16

Why do they keep adding global functions like "intdiv"? For example in JS, it being another language with a similar compatibility burden, they are moving most of the global functions (like parseInt) to "namespaces" (like Number.parseInt) while keeping global references there. When I open the docs (for example, the array functions page[1]), I get frightened by the global functions which do not seem to share a naming c…

This is ongoing in the PHP community. For those who like purity there are tons and tons of wrapper classes that hide all that stuff away.

Modern IDEs autocomplete all the functions, I'm using PHPStorm and as soon as I type 'arr' it shows me a list of all the array functions with parameters listed.

Not perfect, but if I was worried about that kind of thing I'd use Python (which I love) or RoR (which I also love).

The ethos of PHP is to just get stuff done: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-le...

Re: PHP 7 Released

#38

Post by arien »

mattmanser wrote: post #30
arien wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's great to point new developers to the right resources. Besides sane frameworks, there are some good starting/best practices guides to help (that are regularly updated), such as: http://www.phptherightway.com https://phpbestpractices.org Also, I would encourage them to look at different frameworks, not just one. It'll help if they later move onto other languages, as they'll be already exposed to different…

Is phptherightway up to date? I only ask as scanning it I see that it recommends IIS7 for production PHP on windows servers. Which I believe you could only get using an unpatched windows 2008 server?

I don't use PHP on Windows, so I wouldn't know. But looking at php.iis.net and the PHP docs, everything points at IIS7 (or later), so perhaps that's the considered stable/supported version?

Re: PHP 7 Released

#39

Post by marklgr »

rplnt wrote: post #27
toddan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain why.

Have you ever worked with php? I have only slightly and it was truly horrible. The library is a complete rubbish. You couldn't create worse one if you tried. The language development is bad. Some developers are bad. Many users are bad. Does these points make the language bad? Yes. New features are incoherent and seemingly random, issues pop in and out (and back in) because tests simply fail, there are unexplainable s…

PHP is the language many people love to hate; I guess some of them like the idea of being able to point the black sheep of web development, so that they can tell "maybe we have some flaws, but at least we're not one of these PHP shops".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

Re: PHP 7 Released

#40

Post by Jgrubb »

Kartificial wrote: post #34
longwave wrote: post #19

The performance improvements in this release will hopefully encourage people to upgrade, even if the new features don't. Common PHP applications run 70%-100% faster on PHP 7 than they did on PHP 5.6, comparable with or better than HHVM.

That sounds amazing, do you have any sources / benchmarks to back this up?

My own anecdotal evidence - I couldn't believe how fast our Drupal 7 websites were, and they only threw a couple of deprecation notices. They definitely felt 100% faster. We will be upgrading soon.
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