Omg! Today (July, 29) is my 20th birthday. I feel so OLD. Time sure does go by fast!
Archive for July, 2007
It’s been pouring rain for the past few days, gotta love it! I love rain, and after weeks of not having it, glad it’s finally raining. It’s so much cooler now.
God I can’t wait until Fall and Winter.
Finally! PHP has officially announced PHP4’s end of life. Took long enough. Feel sorry for the PHP4 supporters, but hey, once you move to PHP5 - you’ll be Okay, I promise 
This is great news for everyone supporting gophp5.
Here’s the official announcement:
PHP 4 end of life announcement
[12-Jul-2007]
Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.
Woohoo! Go PHP 5!
Today I thought I’d discuss one of the best free/paid PHP IDE’s out there; one I’ve been using for nearly 3 years now. That IDE would be, PHP Designer.
I’ve tried many IDE’s in my day, I believe the count stood at 6 before finding PHP Designer; it was like a “godsend”. It had features that blew most paid IDE’s out of the water.
Starting with PHP Designer 2007, Michael (the creator of the software) decided to make it commercial, while also releasing a personal (free) version. Even though the free version lacks some Pro features, it still beats every IDE I’ve come across.
Myself, I bought the Professional version - the $53 USD was well worth it. And I’d encourage ALL of you to give it a try by downloading the personal version, if you like it (I know you will), it’s easy to upgrade to the Professional version.
More about PHP Designer:
phpDesigner 2007 Professional is a powerful PHP Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for both beginners and professional developers that enhances the process of editing, analyzing and publishing applications and websites powered by PHP and other web languages.
Boost your productivity and simplify complex coding projects through an intelligent set of editing tools that includes full support for PHP 5.2, syntax highlighters, intelligent nested code completion, code tips that are displayed as you type, a project manager, code snippets, large built-in code-libraries, bracket/tag highlighting (matched and unmatched), and numerous tools and wizards to speed up your development.
The strength of PHP lies in its ability to embed it into, and together with, other web languages and technologies. Therefore, phpDesigner 2007 Professional not only supports PHP, but also other web languages such as HTML, MySQL, XML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, Java, C#, Perl, Python and Ruby!
Support for WAMP/LAMP and AJAX developers is provided through intelligent syntax highlighting that automatically switches between syntax highlighters for PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript depending on your position in the document, and dims the rest of the code!
Getting detailed information about more than 3000 native PHP functions on the fly makes the learning curve for PHP as easy and short as possible.
Jump to any declaration in both source and project files with filtering by class, interface, function, variable or constant.
Easily document your code with phpDocumentor, the standard documentation tool for the PHP language, with the built-in phpDocumentor Wizard.
The philosophy behind phpDesigner 2007 Professional is that it be enjoyable to use for hours and hours for both beginners and professional developers through an easy-to-use, intuitive, customizable and tabbed interface.
The professional edition is for any commercial, business, educational, institutional or governmental purpose!
Go ahead, give it a try!
I, as well as many open source developers, have joined the Go PHP 5 initiative. Starting February 5th, 2008 - we will be dropping support for PHP version 4, and will be using PHP 5 instead. My Domain Name Portfolio project is one of many going in this direction.
GoPHP5’s official Press Release:
PHP projects join forces to Go PHP 5
5 July 2007 — A consortium of PHP developers has announced today that several leading Open Source PHP projects will be dropping support for older versions of PHP in upcoming releases of their software as of February 5, 2008 as part of a joint effort to move the PHP developer community fully onto PHP version 5.
The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.
Most PHP-based web applications today run in both PHP version 4 and PHP version 5. PHP 4 was released in 2000, and quickly cemented itself as one of the dominant web development languages. Version 5 was released in 2004 with dramatic improvements in functionality, but adoption has been slow due mostly to the “chicken and egg” problem that accompanies many new platform releases.
“Most of the PHP developers I talk to want to use PHP 5 but can’t because so many web hosts offer PHP 4 by default,” said Larry Garfield, a Drupal developer and one of GoPHP5.org’s founders. “The hosts won’t upgrade until projects do, but projects won’t upgrade until the hosts do. That has made a lot of projects reluctant to be the first to drop support for PHP 4, so we’ve decided that we will all be first.”
By pre-announcing plans to require PHP 5.2 in upcoming software versions in 2008, GoPHP5 hopes to provide web hosts with the incentive to upgrade their servers to newer, more stable, more featurerich versions of PHP as well as sufficient time to do so. Users that are already using current versions of participating projects won’t be left out in the cold, either. All involved projects will continue to support current releases on PHP 4 for their normal life cycle, giving both users and hosts time to plan and implement an upgrade.
“The phpMyAdmin project is very enthusiastic to join the GoPHP5 initiative,” added phpMyAdmin’s project lead, Marc Delisle. “We see GoPHP5 as a way both to improve our product’s new versions — not always having to add workarounds to remain PHP4compatible — and improve the experience of our users — by projecting the correct message about the PHP system itself and its evolution.”
PHP 5 offers developers a wide array of features designed to make developing fast, modern web applications faster and easier. That includes vastly improved XML handling for Web services, an integrated SQL database called SQLite, better handling of time zones, dramatically improved security tools, stronger objectoriented functionality, and more.
Many PHP projects already require PHP 5. Encouraging a larger installedbase of PHP 5 will broaden the market for those projects as well.
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. PHP is one of the leading web development languages in the world, running on a third of the world’s web servers. It is the platform of choice for companies from Yahoo to Facebook as well as the most widely-available development platform on shared hosting, which powers millions of web sites world wide.
For more information:
http://gophp5.org/
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/gophp5.php
http://drupal.org/gophp5Press Contact: larry.garfield@gophp5.org
Ahhhhhhhhh
After all the years and troubles with shared hosting, I’ve finally upgraded to a VPS. Which this site is now (of course) running on. Sooo much better.
I am using JaguarPC, they’ve been in the business forever, and I’ve heard many great things about them. I highly recommend you give them a try, not only do they know what they’re doing, offer great support, etc - they provide unbeatable prices.
You can take a look at their plans here.
Oh happy day!
