PHP

One of the major changes in Drupal 6 (where "major" is defined as "worthy of a mention in Dries' keynote") was a new feature of the menu and theme hooks. The newly introduced "file" and "file path" keys in those hooks' respective retun arrays. allow them to define files that get included conditionally, only when needed. In theory, that should be a big performance boost; page handlers are virtually never called except for on the page they handle, so loading all of that code on every other page is a waste of CPU cycles. Of course, there is also the added cost of the extra disk hit to load that one extra file we need. Modern operating systems should do a pretty good job of caching the file load, but that may vary with the configuration.

So just how much benefit did we get from two dozen fragile patches that were a glorified cut and paste? And is it worth doing more of it? Let's benchmark it and find out.

For those who haven't really been following it, several hundred contributors, 13 months, and tens of thousands of lines of code have gone into making the only version of Drupal ever that is better than Drupal 5. So, naturally, we've released it and called it Drupal 6.

Drupal 6 boasts a boat load of new functionality, ranging from Ajaxy yumminess throughout the system to native support for OpenID to vastly enhanced multi-lingual support. Several entire subsystems have been either overhauled or totally rewritten to proivde more power, flexibility, and speed. The official press release has the complete rundown, or for the more visually inclined there's a new features screencast. For me, though, the new theming system is feature numero uno.

Marco Tabini, of php|architect magazine fame among other things, has been openly disappointed at the death of PHP 4. Not because he likes PHP 4, but because of the "OMG you're discontinuing something that everyone's still using!" argument.

I like your magazine, Marco, but I have to disagree with you on this one. :-)

I've just posted another "Data API What If"-style article over on http://groups.drupal.org/. I figured that was more archiveable than my personal blog, but I wager more people read Drupal Planet than a specific g.d.o group so I'm posting the link here as well in a blatant bit of self-promotion. :-)

I am also posting this over to Planet PHP, in case any other exPHPerts have words of wisdom to offer. Hi guys!

Earlier this week, the PHP team released PHP 4.4.8. Baring any major security holes between now and August 8th, it will be the last release of PHP 4. Ever.

We are also one month away from the GoPHP5 deadline, after which any new releases of almost every major PHP project will require at least PHP 5.2. If you or your web host is running an older version, you are going to run into problems.

The future is neigh. Is your server ready?

The day is nearly upon us! Drupal 7 will open up developers to PHP 5 functionality when it is released next year. Already, there is talk of how, and if, to leverage PHP 5's object handling now that we don't need to deal with the weirdness of PHP 4's object model. Of course, because it's Drupal, our army of performance czars want to know just what the cost is for object handling, and especially advanced object magic like __get(), __call(), the ArrayAccess interface, and so forth.

So let's find out. :-)

One of PHP 5's coolest features is the Standard PHP Library, or SPL. If you're operating in an OO way, SPL is a great way to easily leverage a huge amount of functionality.

Of course, the main problem is that the official documentation on it sucks. At best it points to an off-site series of class hierarchies. (Technically it's not off-site, but not internal to the manual.)

So it's been a week since DrupalCon, which means I'm kinda sorta caught up enough to write about it. Hooray!

As with DrupalCon Sunnyvale, I came away with one conclusion fixed in my mind: The Community is Drupal's greatest strength. Virtually everyone upholds a strong community and open source spirit, and will gladly talk to you for hours about subjects both on topic and off, with or without beer (free or otherwise).

But enough about how cool we are. On with the rundown.

A ran across this article recently making the rounds. In it, the author discusses spending 2 years in Ruby on Rails land before finally giving up and coming home to PHP, wiser for the experience. It's a good article, but one thing in it really raised the hair on my neck.

There has been some discussion recently, in IRC, issue queues, and blogs, about the Drupal 7 database API and its impact on supporting different database engines. While I am still trying to avoid large amounts of public distraction, especially when we're supposed to be trying to get a Drupal 6 beta 1 out the door, I feel it's important to get a few points cleared up lest they lead to confusion later.