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http://www.php.net/

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.4 or PHP 5.3.14.

The release fixes multiple security issues: A weakness in the DES implementation of crypt and a heap overflow issue in the phar extension

PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14 fixes over 30 bugs. Please note that the use of php://fd streams is now restricted to the CLI SAPI

For source downloads of PHP 5.4.4 and PHP 5.3.14 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

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There?s no true alternative except ASP and it?s clear that PHP dominates the market completely.

But it seems like the language is dead ? And a lot of people are criticizing it. PHP5 wasn?t what people expected and PHP6 will never come out. Any word on what?s happening with this ?

They added classes, which seem to make most users happy enough. They spend a lot of time chasing their own tail closing insecurities / bad decisions that were made in the past.

It's sort of the internet's duct tape; it's not the best solution, but it works almost everywhere, and it's cheap.

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PHP exists because it came early (in software frameworks, that's a good thing) and people are used to it. Also, ASP.NET is made by Microsoft, which means that most of the so-called "tech-savvy" people (a.k.a. Linux fanboys and MS haters) will never use it. Now everyone is used to working with PHP and hosting PHP websites - but good luck if you want to find a free host that supports some of the less known frameworks.

It's safe to bet that if all development frameworks had come at the same time, no one would be using PHP. Even its scripting advantage (some people think it is) is void when you compare it to Django or RoR.

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ASP.NET is a framework.

ASP has always been more of a framework, even before .NET, because to create ASP-based web sites at the time when ASP was first showing up and a few years after, you could either use JScript or VBScript to ASP site.

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Also, ASP.NET is made by Microsoft, which means that most of the so-called "tech-savvy" people (a.k.a. Linux fanboys and MS haters) will never use it. Now everyone is used to working with PHP and hosting PHP websites - but good luck if you want to find a free host that supports some of the less known frameworks.

Well, Windows Server costs money, Linux doesn't. That's a big difference in terms of cost of development.

Also, it's not too hard to find cheap hosts that support Django and Rails these days, but compared to PHP, the documentation is lacking, and there's not a lot of popular applications driving those frameworks forward. I bet a huge part of PHPs base is Wordpress / Drupal / Joomla / various other CMSs.

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Documentation alone saves it. I always have CHM version just one click away. There was a time when I thought it's just my "can't be arsed to learn" attitude at fault (which still is to some degree), but other people tend to agree that PHP actually is misdesigned, inconsistent and chaotic, thus trying its best to prevent learning it.

In that respect, it's easy to pick up (and hard to give up), giving one all the freedom in the world, down to one's favorite text editor and one-click installations, but very hard to do correctly. Such freedom is dangerous, developers misuse it. The usual end result is bad practices spaghetti served with a good dose of dependency hell (in-house especially).

Also, Zend is a bunch of mindless jerks who'd be first against the wall if my will prevailed.

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ASP has always been more of a framework, even before .NET, because to create ASP-based web sites at the time when ASP was first showing up and a few years after, you could either use JScript or VBScript to ASP site.

The end of what I wrote should've said:

"...for the ASP site."

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Well, Windows Server costs money, Linux doesn't. That's a big difference in terms of cost of development.

Which is not true of course, the biggest cost in any server would be hardware and maintenance, and for developers the time they have to spend implementing certain code. It certainly isn't the initial licensing cost that determines the true cost of a server.

It might be true that for some companies a linux server is cheaper in the long run, for others, a windows server might be a more appropiate solution.

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It might be true that for some companies a linux server is cheaper in the long run, for others, a windows server might be a more appropiate solution.

Unless your company is filled with handless monkeys, Linux will always be cheaper. Especially when you start setting them up in the hundreds, or thousands.

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i'm not much of a web programmer but it really seems like the internet is in need of one unified language. To that end I won't say much about HTML 5 other than i'm aware that it's supposed to unite overlapping and redundant technologies like html xml xhtml hopefully also php and javascript. But again i haven't web programmed since html 4 first came out and i'm unaware of most of the differences in the languages.

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i'm not much of a web programmer but it really seems like the internet is in need of one unified language. To that end I won't say much about HTML 5 other than i'm aware that it's supposed to unite overlapping and redundant technologies like html xml xhtml hopefully also php and javascript. But again i haven't web programmed since html 4 first came out and i'm unaware of most of the differences in the languages.

http://xkcd.com/927/

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i'm not much of a web programmer but it really seems like the internet is in need of one unified language. To that end I won't say much about HTML 5 other than i'm aware that it's supposed to unite overlapping and redundant technologies like html xml xhtml hopefully also php and javascript. But again i haven't web programmed since html 4 first came out and i'm unaware of most of the differences in the languages.

XML is redundant? Have I been cryogenically frozen for a few years? HTML 5 will never replace PHP or JS.

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If HTML ever becomes a client AND server side scripting language as well as a markup language, most people will just give up on the Internet and go back to passing sheets of paper around. :laugh:

I swear people hear HTML5 and think if you put <canvas> all over a page you'll get Youtube.

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Well, Windows Server costs money, Linux doesn't. That's a big difference in terms of cost of development.

Also, it's not too hard to find cheap hosts that support Django and Rails these days, but compared to PHP, the documentation is lacking, and there's not a lot of popular applications driving those frameworks forward. I bet a huge part of PHPs base is Wordpress / Drupal / Joomla / various other CMSs.

And Facebook

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