PHP4->5 XML wrapper
May 28, 2007
I’ve written here before about the pain that is migrating PHP4 apps which use DOMXML to PHP5. I found a wrapper system, just today, at http://alexandre.alapetite.net/doc-alex/domxml-php4-php5/. I know I’ve looked for this sort of thing before, and I’m not sure why I didn’t find it earlier, but it’s just made a tedious task take about 2 minutes. Thanks guys!
While I’m sure it’s not perfect, it seems to be working well enough for what I needed it to do - basically read data from an XML file in to an array structure. Doesn’t simplexml do that already? Sort of, but I didn’t want to have to go revisit all the code - this wrapper recreates the missing functions giving transparent backwards compatibility. This is the sort of this PHP5 should have shipped with from day one, along with the ability to run both 4 and 5 together as Apache modules side by side.
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Posted in Development, PHP, Software, XML, opensource
May 28th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
While I agree that in interest of backwards compatibility, the old functions should have been retained, the new XML classes, DOM and SimpleXML, are *really* good, and for me, it’s quite painful to have to go back to PHP 4 and write XML-processing code. Make those suckers migrate! It’s for the best.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
You’ll get no argument from me that PHP5 isn’t an improvement for XML processing. It’s just that by simply shutting off old functions and making it impossible for ‘dom’ and ‘domxml’ to coexist, the PHP dev team hindered PHP5 adoption. It was/is one more thing that people to have worry about when upgrading. It’s all fine and dandy to say ‘make them upgrade’, but it’s definitely something which can take time to do right for many projects.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Michael Kimsal’s Blog: PHP4 -> PHP5 XML Wrapper…
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May 29th, 2007 at 8:02 am
[...] his blog, Michael Kimsal points out a PHP4 to PHP5 XML wrapper he dig up over on this site: I know I’ve looked for this sort of [...]