Talk: PHP

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Contents

1 Criticisms section 2 PHP extension 3 Advocacy 4 Date for library list 5 Introduction 6 Pros and cons 7 IDE explanations please 8 Library list links 9 Code Example 10 Parrot (future of php) 11 Coding standard? 12 PHP development 13 New criticisms? 14 Incorrect link to newt 15 No links at all?

Criticisms section

I wish there were a consistent "voice" employed in the Criticisms section of this page. I wish there were a simple table editor available in WYSIWIG mode employed throughout this Wiki. I wish there were a non-techy-oriented version alongside, or somehow more prominently displayed/call-attention-to throughout the article. Anyoo, I made the last sentence first in the criticisms section. Hope that's ok.

)olc

PHP extension

... other sites (like Wikipedia) tend to dispense with the .php extension. This is (I assume) true, but the odd ".phtml" extension does sneak out from under the covers: this AFAIK is an HTML page with PHP content. Would it be fairer to say that Mediawiki (I assume rather than just Wikipedia) tends to hide most PHP-related extensions? Phil 14:54, Dec 17, 2003 (UTC)

The 'other' extensions, such as .php3, .phtml, etc. are all going out, especially because many servers don't parse them. The most universal one is .php, and it is by far the most often used. When you see this in MediaWiki, it's because you're following a "direct" link that isn't being redirected through a rewrite or path info.

It is a common thing to avoid use of the .php extension, and more significantly of query strings, when possible because Google tends to treat sites it can flag as "generated content" much worse than those that are static (or generated ones that pretend.) However, this is okay if you don't want the page on Google - for example, this edit page is wiki.phtml?... and no one searches for edit pages, so this is perfect.

My point is, it's not that MediaWiki is hiding .php and failing to hide .phtml, but rather that it is just not *always* hiding the .phtml. I would suggest the text is fine as-is. -[Unknown] 21:05, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Advocacy

The article currently seems quite to advocate PHP a little too much. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) (Python programmer).

You first correct Python programming language and come back. I don't find any advocacy here. You should learn PHP to know what is true and what is hype.--Rrjanbiah 07:49, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Date for library list

Could somebody provide a date for the complete list of libraries? In other words "This is a complete list of libraries as of <insert date here>." 216.74.222.174 05:37, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Introduction

I think the parenthetical list of possible expansions of the abbreviation detracts from the introductory paragraph. I think it should be reduced to:

PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely used open-source programming language...

The other names should be moved somewhere else in the article. Possibly to the history section? --Rory ☺ 14:31, Jun 16, 2004 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and make the changes. -- Stevietheman 14:55, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I forgot to mention earlier that I went ahead and made the changes.  :) -- Stevietheman 14:51, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Pros and cons

I am definitely a major supporter of PHP, but this article could use a "Pros and cons" section like that in the Delphi article. It's a good way to help people better understand if this is the language/platform they should use for their project, and have the ability to compare/contrast to other languages' capabilities. I probably won't have the time to write this in the near future, but if anyone is so inclined, please go ahead and do it. -- Stevietheman 14:50, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I am both a fan AND detractor of PHP. I hope my addition of a criticism section meets with everyone's approval. AdmN 19:59, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Looks like a good writeup or at least a start. I cleaned it up a little. -- Stevietheman 20:41, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately, some of the criticisms are funny and looks like intentionally found/written. Just curious, where else such criticism is available? --Rrjanbiah 05:33, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "intentionally found," though I assume you are implying a non-neutral point of view. I use PHP on a semi-regular basis. Like any language on Earth, it is great at some things, and not so great at others. All in all, I enjoy PHP. It allows me to do things that would be nearly impossible, (or at least really hard), without it. It is, in fact, the only server-side technology that I have ever really gotten into.

This page: [1] both provides criticism and the following links: [2], [3], [4], [5].

AdmN 06:46, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

PHP is now 5 and many of the criticisms are now not valid. Like many other languages, PHP is also inspired by C's function names (like strcmp, stricmp, etc). I see, much of the criticism are like complaining C's syntax by an assembler diehard who is confined to only one way of thinking and syntax. --Rrjanbiah 10:17, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

We shouldn't be afraid of criticism. The listed criticisms of PHP 4 are based on facts (otherwise, I would have edited them out). We should also realize that many of us will be using PHP 4 for a long time before migrating to PHP 5. Even if PHP 5 has fixed some of the problems, most PHP developers have to deal with web hosting providers that haven't upgraded for months (or maybe even years) to come. -- Stevietheman 13:56, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Fair enough, but criticising old version (which is fixed and improved now) is not pleasing. Also, _criticising PHP because it is PHP_ is not interesting, IMHO; otherwise the computing world is only with 1s and 0s without C, PHP, etc. --Rrjanbiah 06:23, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Not pleasing to whom? It's pleasing to me to know facts about any language I might choose for a project. Further, PHP is not being singled out here. Delphi has a "Pros and cons" section, and other languages includes criticisms as well. Let's not get worked up over this. -- Stevietheman 14:45, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

IDE explanations please

The IDE section could do with being more than just a list of links. I for one could do with some sort of explanations as to the relative strengths/weaknesses of the various IDEs, together with which OS they work on. --Phil | Talk 10:24, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

There is a wonderful site dedicated to this [6]. My favorite is PHPEdit [7] (now not free), PHP Coder, devPHP and Komodo (All on XP). --Rrjanbiah 05:39, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Library list links

The library list contains some links to completely irrelevant articles like stream (chiefly about moving water) and token (a disambiguation page) that should be renamed to their appropriate computer counterparts. Livajo 19:49, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I had updated about 1 third of the list (with links to manual and checking all wiki-links), saved it, to continue a day or two later. But my changes was reverted by Stevietheman. Why? Because it was partial, or because my work is unwanted? I don't want to finish it, if it is just going to be reverted again. -- Myplacedk 22:07, 2004 Sep 2 (UTC)

I think it would be fair to re-revert Stevietheman's edits if he doesn't give a reason for his reversion. I glanced at the history and I can't see any clear reason to revert.—Rory ☺ 23:01, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

Reason: There's no point in providing external links there--it's clutter. The wikilinks should point to articles that provide the external links. It's better to trust that the wikilinked articles will provide that info, and if they don't, they will/should eventually. -- Stevietheman 23:22, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It hink there is a point. For example, the current list mentions the COM-extention, which of course linked to Component object model (AFTER my update). But that article does not mention PHP's implementation of it, of course. The "Direct IO" extention linked to an article about what I/O is, in computer terms. This is also great, but of course, again, the article says nothing about the PHP implementation of it. I think these external links are quite useful, but if I'm the only one... -- Myplacedk 05:13, 2004 Sep 3 (UTC)

This is an encyclopedia article, not the complete unabridged PHP reference. -- Stevietheman 05:30, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I agree about clutter but didn't the edits also remove ambiguous links? I would recommend the same edits but without the external links for the reasons given by Stevietheman.—Rory ☺ 00:44, Sep 3, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the external links was the easy part. The time consuming part of my work was updating the wiki links. I'll re-revert... -- Myplacedk 05:13, 2004 Sep 3 (UTC)

I will agree to any fixes of ambiguous links. I realize that I may have swept away a small degree of goodness in the revert I made. Just don't bring back the external links, please. -- Stevietheman 02:53, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If the wiki links really isn't more worth to you, it might as just remove all af them, then it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes to make the complete update. :-/ -- Myplacedk 05:13, 2004 Sep 3 (UTC)

And I'll revert any such changes that don't make sense. -- Stevietheman 05:30, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Code Example

The article features a poor code example. Control structures are not pointed out, the // comment method could be better placed to show its features. Print and echo do not do the same thing--echo dumps data out immediately to the browser, whereas I think print dumps it when it's finished processing the script. Using echo lots of times is thus not very efficient. Yes, this is an encyclopedia article, not a php reference, but a code example that showed more features of the language would be better appreciated by readers checking out different languages. --User:66.226.249.19

Feel free to enhance and expand the example. -- Stevietheman 20:02, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I turned it into a 99 bottles of beer -example, trying to demonstrate various structures in it. What do you think? --ZeroOne 21:49, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Looks pretty good, although it could be made to require less width (too much word wrapping) and fix a few errors. I'm too tired to tackle it tonite though. -- Stevietheman 06:14, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I'm using 1600x1200 resolution so I really don't know how the lines will wrap with lower resolutions. I tried to account for this but apparently didn't do it well enough. The code sure runs (PHP 4.3.something) so there are no syntactical errors. :p --ZeroOne 10:49, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sorry. I didn't necessarily mean syntax errors. -- Stevietheman 16:55, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The differences between echo and print are often not well understood, because they are so similar. I often here people say they think there's a specific difference.. that doesn't actually exist. Please see the following, from php.net's page on print():

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/1/fid/40

In other words, the difference is that echo can take multiple parameters. This is noticably faster, in my benchmarks, than single quotes concatenated together *OR* double quote interpolation. Regardless, that's not the point... I just wanted to note that there is no such difference.

I've also slightly updated the code example with some minor conventional issues, because most people will agree it looks nicer to put spaces around operators. Additionally, I tweaked the wrapping to look nicer in 800x600, because it was so close. If you disagree, I'm sorry... it can easily be changed back.

Parrot (future of php)

I'd put a reference somewhere to possible future directions for the project. For example Lerdorf has declared in an interview they could take in account Parrot as a possible basis for future releases.

Also the licence type is not even indicated, nor the disputes about it. And history part, besides being a bit poor in my opinion, seems to overstate the role of Zend contribution. It's sure relevant but after all is a collaborative effort. ciao --Balubino 18:07, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Here's some reference. Rasmus interview at Linux Bangalore meeting where he cites the convenience of using the parrot engine and why they are thinking about it. Then an article again by Rasmus which describes the beginning of the project and also the plans for the future. Finally php.net's history page in user manual. ciao --Balubino 18:31, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Coding standard?

Personally, I think the link just added, named "PHP Coding Standard", to be... not neccessarily so official. If I were new to PHP, I might think that was official with its name. I don't know what to name it otherwise, but I just wanted to ask... are things like that allowed? Could I write up a quick guide to PHP (I actually have, a decently-used tutorial on how to install the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, and Apache without the help of packages..) and just stick it on there, with a name like The Ultimate Guide to Life, the Universe, and Installation :P?

-[Unknown] 19:49, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

You might seriously consider contributing it to Wikibooks. --Phil | Talk 10:02, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps so... but, my primary concern here is simply that I'm not so sure this article (PHP) is meant to be a respository of "unofficial" documents like one proclaiming itself to be the "PHP Coding Standard". Indeed, many of the function names built into PHP "violate" this supposed standard... -[Unknown] 16:30, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

So... I guess it's staying? Can it at least be given a different name, such as "Unofficial..." or "A common..."? -[Unknown] 09:49, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)

PHP development

Following the recent "tidying" exercise, would it be an idea to move the sections on frameworks and IDEs to a new PHP development article? --Phil | Talk 14:08, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

New criticisms?

Global variables such as $_GET, for retrieving information from the URL, could cause problems as users could
manipulate poorly written code to make the website not function as intended by the author.

And why is this? Did you know that I could manipulate argv such that poorly written C programs would fail? I could also manipulate the input variables for Perl programs on the query string or in POST data such that poorly written Perl programs would fail. And, why does global make them more fallable? Simply because you were taught global is bad in school?

Sorry, but I just don't see how that is a concern at all. The register_globals one is indeed a concern, and so is the fact that by default, users are not "jailed" into a certain directory. Another concern is that, on most systems, PHP runs as nobody, often meaning that files have to be writable by everyone for things to function properly.

But... superglobals such as $_GET? Security holes? How?

-[Unknown] 09:48, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)

Incorrect link to newt

The link to newt is wrong but I can't find a corect link, should it be removed?

I would personally remove it... or, that is, not link it. -[Unknown] 21:02, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

No links at all?

Tregoweth, while I strongly support your motivations and intents... was removing ALL but one of the links really necessary? Sure, many of the links being added (mostly by unregistered users) were not needed, and there were far too many (perhaps a list of PHP development tools or something would be better?)... but removing all of them? -[Unknown] 09:16, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

I restored the links. I agree that there's probably some spam in there, but the removals should be more surgical rather than like a rape.  :) There were too many useful links for PHP developers there. -- Stevietheman 16:55, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any; just keep in mind who will be reading the article. Someone looking up PHP here probably doesn't know anything about it and is just looking for basic information, so links to development tools, etc., seem excessive. And shouldn't PHP developers have better places to look for links than here? :) —tregoweth 17:02, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)