I think it's vital. We need a better way of installing applications. The PEAR installer is needed at this point, as it is hard to download any PHP application and just make it work. If we can get a single unified installer so you can see PEAR and just make it work, that would be cool.
What key features can developers expect in PHP 5?
There will be a lot of improvements to the object orientation and how it is handled. Objects will be passed around by reference now. It's a little bit more like how you do it in Java and other languages, so people who are into OO will be happy with the approach. There will be clean-ups here and there. Personally I'm working on an input filtering system, where you can define a security policy for your site. This is to get rid of cross side scripting hacks. The input filtering stuff I'm working on would strip out all JavaScript and all HTML by default, or you can set it to whatever kind of input filtering you want.
How do you rate Open Source Documentation?
Across the board it's pretty poor I think. There are too many examples of open source code with proprietary documentation. That's a little bit annoying. If you really want to use it you have to buy the book. It's been getting better. But overall it's not great because it's hard to motivate people to write really good documentation. Often with developers they either hate doing it, or are really bad at it, so you need other people who are really good technically who will sit and spend the time to write documentation. We've done pretty well at PHP. We treat documentation folks just like developers, they have just as high a profile. Somehow we have attracted a lot of people who are interested in documentation.
What do you think of the Apache 2.0 right now?
I'm not a big fan of 2.0 right now. It works as a stand-alone server, serving static pages, but the multi-threaded model [which runs] on UNIX is not quite there in many cases. Individual applications that don't rely on a whole slew of different third party libraries can be written to be very thread safe, very nice and very fast. But general-purpose stuff like PHP and PERL which tie into so many different libraries [are more of a concern because] we don't know if those libraries are safe or not. My concern with PHP and Apache 2.0 right now is that if we go Apache 2 with a threaded MPM at this point, there is a lot of stuff that will break. I don't think there is a compelling reason to switch to Apache 2.0 at this point, there is no killer feature. Apache 1.3 does the job. There are some killer features in the pipeline, when they get completed, and when they work, we will make all this stuff work under Apache 2.0, but right now it's a lot of work with very little benefit. It will take a couple of years still before Apache 2.0 and PHP will work well.
What do you think of ASP.NET and ColdFusion MX and how do you think they compare to PHP?
ColdFusion I think is dead, and ASP.NET is very windows-centric. Coldfusion I find way too pointy, clicky, "GUIy" to be useful for anything. ASP is cool you can basically do the same things. I just don't like being restricted to a single platform. I don't like how proprietary it is, I don't like how closed it is. I prefer open environments. I prefer being able to change my tools and talk to the developers. Who wrote ASP? Microsoft? No they didn't, some guy at Microsoft did. I don't like being hidden from the tools that are important to my business.
