Slumming it – php4 & procedural programming
After almost 2 years of exclusively programming in OOP php5 I ‘ve spent the last few months programming on a couple of projects in php4 & procedural based programming.
To say the least I feel like I’ve been regressing back several years. While WordPress & similar applications encourage API’s and plugins to be class based still the underlying application these run on are in general php4 class based architecture with only token gestures to framework & patterns.
Complience to php5.2 functionality is in reality only a smokescreen to enable prodcuts to ‘work’ with php5.2 – in terms of the changes to ini settings, return functions of various php innards etc. Noe use the power of php5.2+ including things like SPL.
We await this next generation of CMS & commerce platforms… but don’t hold your breath!
After getting used to php5’s class based structure, patern-based programming architecture, including variants of MVC it makes me appreciate just how good php5 is, how much of a leap php6 (& really php5.3+) are going to be, and just how far away from this the majority of php based applications are from this.
I’ll no doubt be posting (ranting!) more on the subject of php5 frameworks & templating engines in the future.
Sadly patternsforphp.com seems no more. Still goPHP5 is worth a visit.
