I came accross an interesting announcement on PHP Classes this morning:

The Plot to Kill PHP MySQL Extention

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/...Extension.html


What does everyone think about this?

The MySQLi extension provides all of the functionality of the MySQL extension plus a lot more. There's no reason why applications being written now should use mysql_* functions.

Lack of support for prepared statements alone is enough reason to drop the extension.

Does PHP 5.3+ come prepackaged with MySQLi? I personally have never used it because recently I've never had to do very database-intensive tasks. I understand it's very powerful, but I'm no good at installing PECL extensions

PHP 5.0+ comes packaged with mysqli, it just has to be enabled at install time.

Originally Posted by NullPointer

PHP 5.0+ comes packaged with mysqli, it just has to be enabled at install time.

Oh, thanks Null!

MySQLi also has to have the extention loaded in the ini. Who knows if this may disappear in the future also. Might be helpful to start using PDO interface full-time now.

The whole article is based on the fact that people will need to "re-code" their sites / apps.

This is a stupid argument for keeping it.

The reason things get deprecated is because they get old and not as good as the newer classes/modules.

If you want to keep using the old module then fine, keep using it. compile with it in and keep running.

If you want your app to stay secure and up to date then use the newer modules / classes.

It really is not much effort to update code from one version another , in most cases it uses the exact same syntax and doesn't even require a code change.

Just another "oh my god that's the end for PHP and MYsql..."
That just wont ever happen as long as people still use PHP and as far as I can tell, This will continue to be one of the worlds most popular scripting languages for a long time yet.