PHP Version Differences

Flourish is designer to be fully functional on PHP 5.1+. There are, however a number of end-programmer differences between PHP 5.1 and 5.2. This page contains an overview of the major differences.

Callback Formats

In both 5.1 and 5.2, callbacks to instance methods of object are formulated as an array with the first element being the object and the second being a string of the method name.

$date = new fDate();
$callback = array($date, '__toString');

Similarly, with both 5.1 and 5.2 static method callbacks can be created with an array containing a string of the class and a string of the static method to call.

$callback = array('fCore', 'backtrace');

In 5.2, however, a second static method callback format was added. The new format consists of a single string with the class name concatenated with :: and then the method name.

$callback = 'fCore::backtrace';

If you are using callbacks with Flourish, be sure to check out how Flourish provides an intuitive callback syntax.

Converting Objects to Strings

Many different kinds of objects, especially value objects, will intrinsically have a string representation of their value. In both 5.1 and 5.2 a __toString() method can be defined for any object. The difference between 5.1 and 5.2 is the automatic conversion of an object to a string.

In 5.1, the __toString() method is only automatically called when an object is echoed or printed. However, if the object is concatenated with another string during the echo or print statement, the __toString() method is not called. In PHP 5.2 this behavior was fixed, and the __toString() method is called whenever a string is expected.

In the context of Flourish, all classes that represent some sort of simple value have a predefined __toString() methods. Also, any methods that accept strings or objects will automatically check for a __toString() method on a object and call that. The only thing to keep in mind is that when using objects where strings are expected you will need to explicitly call __toString() if the code will be run on an environment with 5.1.