Patrick Allaert has put together a shell command that can take your PHP4 code and replace its current constructors with PHP5-formatted ones.

It assumes your classes are always declared with the class keyword starting at the beginning of the line and that your files have the .php extension.

It uses a regular expression in a perl command to search through the current directory and look for the ".php" files to replace the "function ClassName" sort of thing with a "function __construct".

As a way of answering the common language comparison question (PHP vs Java/Perl), Stefan Mischook has posted these thoughts comparing the languages himself.

[For web development] PHP is the way to go. Perl is a good language but it was not designed initially for web development - that functionality was added later.

He talks about his experience using Perl in web-based environments and some of the issues he's seen around using it or Java for web applications...including a suggestion for Java's place in the world:

Java is great for the enterprise...that means, if you plan to be working for very large companies. But it takes a lot longer to create anything in Java vs PHP.

The Enterprise PHP Magazine has pointed out some facts (slightly skewed, it seems) about the availability of a few different types of programmers, PHP included, according to several search engines.

I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

The results show about 780,000 PHP-related resumes on Google, 541,000 on Yahoo and the (obviously incorrect) 59,700,000 from Bing.com. There are a lot of PHP developers out there, but I can't imagine quite that many. Either way, even the numbers from the other search engines come in over the counts of the other three languages.

Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

Recently CIO Magazine had a roundtable interview with representatives from each of the major language players on the web today - Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, Tcl and, of course, PHP.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.

Eirik Hoem has pointed out an online tool a coworker shared with him to work with regular expressions for multiple languages.

A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results.

The tool lets you put in the string you want to match again and the pattern you want to match with. The results are automatically populated below it, making it easy to fine-tune your expression to only what you want.

Arnold Daniels points out a quick method for creating what he calls "perl-like temporary variables" in the global scope of a script:

When writing code in the global scope, I often have a problem where I'm overwriting a variable. This happens even more often when I work on code of somebody else. Usually has the variable which does the overwriting is usually just a temporary variable.

His code is a simple few lines that shows how it could be used when trying to write information out to a file handle. Some of the comments on the post criticize his use of the global scope but Arnold comes back with his reasoning - mostly that there is already code in the global scope and that adding something else is only adding to it, not making things worse.

Jeff Moore has posted and shared an interesting graph showing something I'd never thought about comparing one language versus another on - the number of keywords it uses.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

As mentioned by Elizabeth Naramore on the php|architect website today, the XAMPP project has released a new version of their software to automagically install Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl.

From ApacheFriends.org:

In all versions we updated Apache to 2.2.6, PHP to 5.2.4 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.1. (Find more details on the specific download page.) I'm sorry to say, but under Windows we currently have problems with the new Apache and mod_perl, which doesn't work at all. We hope to find a solution soon.

Links to download the version for your OS of choice (Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris) can be found on this page of the project's website.

Richard Thomas, creator of the jQPie helper application (PHP for jQuery) is suggesting a broader scope for the project in his new blog post:

Now I have slightly larger goals, the Pie represents the slices of code I hope to pack within. Currently there is a php5 slice, and another person has shown some interest in working on a php4 version.

Now I am looking for you! Yea you there the one looking at jQPie thinking it would be cool to use but your knee deep in Python, or Perl, or any other language.

His ultimate goal is to have a single javascript library that can span as many languages as it can right out of the box. To help the effort along, he's offering 2 cash prizes to developers - one for the Python/Ruby-ers out there and the other for Perl-heads. The best, most complete (working) library wins. Keep an eye on his blog for more details on the contest and when it starts.