php5

Drupal has long prided itself for staying ahead of the curve technologically. In order to be able to write the best quality Drupal software, Drupal developers need the best programming tools available. Today, the best PHP available is PHP 5.

PHP 5 has been deployed and tested in production environments for three years. Unfortunately, web hosts have been slow to adopt PHP 5, which has made it difficult for Drupal and many other PHP projects to fully embrace PHP 5's features.

PHP5 takes users increasingly in the direction of object-oriented programming. The Standard PHP Library (SPL) is a new item that helps developers both with the creation of OOP applications and the maintenance of standardization. The SPL enables developers to work with user-defined interfaces. In this article, the first of a series, Alejandro Gervasio uses examples to introduce you to working with these interfaces, which can keep you from having to reinvent the wheel with each new project.

With the release of PHP5, a strong effort has been made to improve the existing Object Model available in previous versions of PHP. Taking PHP into the context of object-oriented programming was certainly a controversial topic, and very often the subject of many heated discussions. One recurring theme was the absence of relevant OOP features, available from long mature object-oriented languages such as Java or C++.