Lazycoder

Changes in PHP 5.0

As it get closer to a final release, I started looking over the changes to PHP in version 5.0.Now I’m starting to wonder, why use it? Most of the radical changes are in the Zend Engine 2.0 and the most important change is the addition of many keywords associated with object oriented programming (final, destructors, abstract, etc…). Which makes me wonder; If PHP supports a C syntax and has the object oriented features of C++, why wouldn’t you go ahead and use one of the bajillion C++ CGI/HTML libraries out there and just code your web application in C++? What about Java, or C# (either on an MS platform or on MONO)?The addition of the SQLite engine to PHP makes it pretty compelling, but a C++ API already exists for SQlite. I think the most compelling reason for using PHP still is it’s built in DB functions. Not that there aren’t existing libraries out there for any DB in almost any language, but PHP does kind of lump them all into one attractive package.