Comments on: Slides from my “Upgrading to PHP 5″ talk http://www.laurathomson.com/2006/04/slides-from-my-upgrading-to-php-5-talk/ Laura Thomson's random thoughts and rants about tech and FOSS Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:46:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Andrew van der Stock http://www.laurathomson.com/2006/04/slides-from-my-upgrading-to-php-5-talk/#comment-64 Andrew van der Stock Tue, 16 May 2006 11:26:12 +0000 http://www.laurathomson.com/?p=62#comment-64 Cool slides, but I think you missed a couple of things... which may have been because you only had 34 slides instead of 4534 slides. The primary issue a PHP 4 person will face is the loss of register_globals. We spent more time on this one issue than anything else with UltimaBB. Second issue for us was dealing with oddness in PHP 4 that is no longer an issue in PHP 5. The last issue is that it is totally unrealistic today to ship PHP 5-only code. If PHP 4 sees PHP 5 code, it simply stops. No explanation, no nothing. Always test code with PHP 4 (php -l file.php) to make sure you don't do this to the poor saps still on PHP 4. There are huge benefits for going down PHP 5 / MySQL 5.0 path - we finally fixed our DAO layer with the OO version of MySQLi which found and allowed us to fix some bizarre hard to fix issues latent in our PHP 3/4 MySQL DAO layer. Just by using the better interfaces we found and fixed the mix up in resource vs link that was silenty accepted by PHP 4, but failed silenty vs stopping with a decent exception in PHP 5. That was a two year bug! I hate loose typing. Not just saying "hate" because I am stuck for words, I mean "hate" properly. It's just lazy and causes bugs. Cool slides, but I think you missed a couple of things… which may have been because you only had 34 slides instead of 4534 slides.

The primary issue a PHP 4 person will face is the loss of register_globals. We spent more time on this one issue than anything else with UltimaBB.

Second issue for us was dealing with oddness in PHP 4 that is no longer an issue in PHP 5.

The last issue is that it is totally unrealistic today to ship PHP 5-only code. If PHP 4 sees PHP 5 code, it simply stops. No explanation, no nothing. Always test code with PHP 4 (php -l file.php) to make sure you don’t do this to the poor saps still on PHP 4.

There are huge benefits for going down PHP 5 / MySQL 5.0 path - we finally fixed our DAO layer with the OO version of MySQLi which found and allowed us to fix some bizarre hard to fix issues latent in our PHP 3/4 MySQL DAO layer. Just by using the better interfaces we found and fixed the mix up in resource vs link that was silenty accepted by PHP 4, but failed silenty vs stopping with a decent exception in PHP 5. That was a two year bug!

I hate loose typing. Not just saying “hate” because I am stuck for words, I mean “hate” properly. It’s just lazy and causes bugs.

]]> By: Chris Shiflett http://www.laurathomson.com/2006/04/slides-from-my-upgrading-to-php-5-talk/#comment-63 Chris Shiflett Thu, 27 Apr 2006 21:29:56 +0000 http://www.laurathomson.com/?p=62#comment-63 http://laurathomson.com/talks/upgrading.ppt http://laurathomson.com/talks/upgrading.ppt

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