Add support for PHP 5 in the XP framework

  Status: implemented,  Tue Dec 19 12:57:28 CET 2006
  • Created: 2006-12-07 14:14:46+0100
  • Categories: <strategy>
  • Author: kiesel

Scope of Change

The XP framework will add support for PHP 5 from a certain release date on. Support for PHP 4 will continue until a not yet defined point in the future in form of security or bug fixes.

Version numbers are bumped to 5.0.0. A 5-x version number indicates that XP is only running on PHP 5.2.0 or greater.


Rationale

XP framework for PHP4 has been written with PHP5's features in mind, planning to migrate to PHP5 as soon as it was released.

To increase stability and development speed and to gain advantage of some of the new features / APIs that PHP5 does offer, support for PHP 5 is required.

Functionality



Repository layout



A new directory next to skeleton/ will be introduced that contains a fully working, migrated copy of all classes of the framework. Also, another tree of files will be added with files that cannot be automatically converted, like the source files of the XP framework core.

The new directory layout in the repository looks like that: 

trunk/
  skeleton/
  ports/
    classes/
    dist/
  web/
  util/
branches/
  xp4/
    skeleton/
    ports/
      classes/
      dist/
    web/
    util/

First, files from trunk/ will be copied (branched) to branches/xp4. Second, all classes in skeleton and ports/classes will be migrated to their PHP5 versions.

The xp4 branch will only receive security updates or bugfixes. It's status will be changed to "bugfix only, no development". The trunk version (PHP5) will be the officially supported XP version.

In the initial migration, all projects in ports/dist are excluded. They continue to exist in branches/xp4 and can be migrated step by step into trunk again once they're manually migrated and checked.

Third-party applications

Third-party applications - or in general - applications that base on version 4 of the XP framework are not required to support both branches. The co-existance of PHP4- and PHP5-versions targets a seamless traversion from PHP4 to PHP5 for just these applications.

Application developers may decide to switch from 4 to 5 at one point.

Security considerations

n/a

Speed impact

n/a

Dependencies



Related documents



Comments

- friebe, Thu Dec 14 13:32:06 2006 Another idea would be to keep the migrated PHP5 classes in a branch, say, branches/xp5 and have skeleton/ and ports/ there (no "2" in the directory names). At the time we want to switch, we'd move trunk to branches/xp4 and branches/xp5 to trunk.

- kiesel, Mon Dec 18 17:05:49 CET 2006 As discussed, the master/slave model and priority for the XP4 version will be dropped, in favor of XP5 which becomes the main development tree.

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