You may have heard of it, you may not. Go PHP 5 is a strong initiative which is trying to push for vital change in the PHP community. PHP has a hefty following of developers and and has served those developers well. However, PHP 5 has been ignored by the majority of hosts and large projects for far too long now. Given that PHP 6 is now in major development isn't about time companies let go of the past and allowed change for the better? With companies refusing to upgrade, developers are forced to code for PHP 4 (including myself!). With developers still providing so much code for PHP 4, hosting companies are reluctant to upgrade. It's a vicious circle that has been a sticking point for a long time.
Go PHP 5, widely accepted by anyone involved with PHP development, was set up to bring about the change that's needed. It sets a deadline for
projects to cease all support for PHP4 and move to PHP 5.2. Projects may take the pledge at their own discretion but the more projects in agreement, the
more pressure to move.
Not only is gophp5.org targeted at PHP projects, it also lists hosting companies in agreement with the pledge. Swift Mailer is taking the pledge along with lots of other large projects. The deadline for switching to PHP 5, as set out by gophp5.org, is February, 5th 2008. At the time of writing, that gives an ample amount of time to get up to date with PHP.
So how does this actually impact on Swift Mailer? It improves the capabilities! There are already two parallel versions of Swift Mailer available because I am a PHP 5 developer at heart. The PHP5 branch of Swift really is purely PHP 5, taking advantage of plenty of the newer OOP features. However, I have to tread very carefully when working in PHP5 because just about every feature I add to the library needs to be available in PHP 4 using the same interface. This has already been a major sticking point in the development which most users would probably not have reason to think about, but for me it makes developing new features painful at times. The Go PHP 5 initiative will give me the freedom I need to develop with PHP 5 utilising the PHP 5-specific features to the full. As a result, the quality of code will improve and the end-user experience will improve.
February 5th, 2008 - Swift goes PHP 5!
