Upgrade the servers to PHP 5.3

[Easen]

Hello there,

My suggestion is to upgrade PHP on the servers to 5.3.

Lately I have been doing some local developing in 5.3, it seems to be a great improvement on 5.2.x as it includes the concepts of namespaces, closures, late static binding (PHP: New features - Manual).... which is something I have been waiting for in PHP for some time. It's just a shame I can't use any of the code I have written on my web server.

I understand that there are a few deprecated features in 5.3 (PHP: Backward Incompatible Changes - Manual), but it's not as dramatic as moving from PHP 4 to 5.

What does everyone else think about this?

Thanks.

[hobwebs]

:eek: What will it break?

[Terryphi]

Could this be a problem:

(Quote from Backward Incompatible Changes)

The new mysqlnd library necessitates the use of MySQL 4.1's newer 41-byte password format. Continued use of the old 16-byte passwords will cause mysql_connect() and similar functions to emit the error, "mysqlnd cannot connect to MySQL 4.1+ using old authentication."

What password format are we currently using?

[Drew]

ohhh it breaks LOADS of stuff !

[Colin]

We can't upgrade it as it causes a hell of a lot of problems on our test server. It stopped wordpress from working for a start. Any program that uses eregi() would have to be patched or you will get Function eregi() is deprecated

So no upgrades

[Mike]

I'm all for new features, but why do they have to keep breaking things?

[jabb0]

I think it would be cool if we could do it the way it was done a while back where you could specify the php version to use depending on the file extension of your script. i.e. all .php (eg index.php) files run that current version and any php5 (ie index.php5) runs the new version. (i am not even certain this was available here, but i seen it done somewhere)

Alas i do not pretend to know anything about anything when it come to server/network configuration, so be gentle!

I would easily kill someone if i could use that to negotiate using php 5.3 here tho. :cool:

[Easen]

Thanks for all your comments!

Colin, I didn't realise that it would break a Wordpress, I guess it may also break alot of other off-the-shelf software packages. I never thought of this as I primerely build my own CMS/PHP Framework.

It would be nice to have PHP 5.3 running along side PHP 5.2, the only way I can see this happening to implement what jabb0 has described. Have Apache run *.php5 files under PHP 5.3. Personally I don't see this as a practical method to get PHP 5.3 running on the servers, as I see this method as staging technique - to allow people to test their code against PHP 5.3.

I guess I am going to have stick with PHP 5.2.x until it's not actively developed/supported, thus forcing everyone to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

[Mike]

I don't see Java having ridiculous compatibility issues such as these.

How about some JSP/Servlet hosting, Colin?

[Easen]

I don't think these are ridiculous compatibility issues, if you go through them all they seem to be reasonable. For example, the fact that MySQL's 16 byte password format is removed is because it's insecure compared to the new 41 byte password format.

The deprecation of 'ereg', 'split', session_register', etc. functions is just the PHP developers cleaning up duplicated code and ensuring everything behind the scenes is categorised by 'extension'/'feature', to make it easier to maintain in the future.

This is similar to Python 3.0 - a complete re-write of Python 2.x to remove any unmodular code and to replace it something more OO. This is to ensure it's maintainable for the future.

Just to clear things up, Java doesn't really have these problems as it's hardly ever upgraded , plus who wants to code in Java :p

Originally Posted by Mike:
I don't see Java having ridiculous compatibility issues such as these.

How about some JSP/Servlet hosting, Colin?