OOP, PHP5 and Mr Commercial

[Jason Batten]

I've been around some forums and I have noticed some talk about companies not using or supporting PHP5 for development. I've read comments about there not being a stable enough version of PHP5 and other tibbets. My issue, question, buff is if this is true would it be easier to learn Classes & Objects for PHP4 rather than learning all the joys of PHP5 OOP then being disappointed?

I don't know, maybe I am just being slack cos PHP5 OOP is hard on my brain :o

[bubblenut]

I think that one of issues people did have with PHP5 was the fact that Zend were only releasing a paid version of the optimizer for it which was charged on a per processor basis. If you've got a cluster of 20 quad processor machines (not uncommon) then you're going to be paying out a hefty sum.

As far as I can see the optimizer is now free for all. PHP5 is very stable and, in fact, the company I work for will be doing a complete site overhaul in the new year using PHP5 as the base language.

In terms of learning PHP5 OOP, I'd say there's not a lot of point in learning PHP4's OO model. If you learn PHP5's you will be introduced to concepts, patterns and practices which are used in enteprise (let's not start the argument about whether php is enteprise level yet) languages like Java.

[goldbug]

Isn't the Optimizer free? Or are you talking about the whole Platform?

Also....if you've got the scratch for 20 quad-processor machines... you might just have the money for licenses :D

PS: you still working @ last.fm/audioscrobbler?

[bubblenut]

Nah, I got seduced back into being a corporate whore (damn, no blush any more :blush:). Left on perfectly good terms with Last.fm though.

CD-WOW! offered me head web-developer. Lots more money (33% pay rise over last.fm) and some really cool projects comming up.

I just implemented a lucene searching sollution with mini, java based, proxy clients on each of the webservers and now I'm moving onto integrating memcached into product and chart retrieval. These two don't even come close to the complete site re-development which I'll be completely (on the programming side anyway) in charge of, kicking off early next year :D :D

[Shrike]

PHP 5 isn't really _that_ much of a stretch on PHP 4's object model in any case...people were doing dirty hacks in PHP 4 (abstract methods) which are just now built into PHP 5. The only significant things missing from PHP 4 is strongly typed objects (sort of) and interfaces. The core principles of OOP are in both versions.

Like Bubblenut says PHP 5 is a bit more like Java, and most of what you learn with PHP 5 will translate easily into PHP 4. So you might as start with 5 :)

[Jason Batten]

Cheers for the info guys :)