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PHP 4 End of Life Announcement
perbert writes "The PHP development team has announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. Critical security fixes will be made available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, there is a migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well."
I hope that everyone has moved beyond PHP 4.X by this point. 5.X is more secure and capable.
Put identity in the browser.
Agreed - on TFA I was hoping to see the 'PHP4 to Python' migration guide
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
PHP is like training wheels without the bike.
While I can completely understand the need for this to occur, I can see this causing alot of problems for many small businesses, personal webpages, and hosting companies. PHP5 is definitly worthwhile switching to from PHP4, but there are so many poorly coded sites out there that wont run properly under PHP5, and this at some point is going to cause a nightmare for various hosting companies.
Your typical small business or personal webpage will frequently use PHP, and have little knowledge of how to fix their code to get it working, or how to upgrade their 3rd party software to a PHP5 Compatible version. At the same time hosting companies who will reach a point where they need to upgrade to PHP5 in order to keep their systems as secure as possible (because PHP4 security fixs might not be coming out) will be faced with many angry customers who are unwilling to spend time or money to change a site that they see as working previously.
I can completely understand why a company might need to stop supporting an old version of their product at some point when newer ones are freely available, I just am not looking forward to all the headaches its going to cause. I can hear the phones of angry customers threatening to kill me because i "broke their site" now.
Oh well, hopefully all PHP5 code will wind up working just fine in PHP6 when it comes out.
http://interserver.net/
If only the subject had left out the "4." "PHP End of Life." I'd cheer for that. I'd say good riddance to a braindead language.
Are you saying Microsoft is a braindead company for tying up with Zend to enhance PHP on Windows servers? Microsoft and Zend Technologies Announce Technical Collaboration to Improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows Server Platform
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I have a large (ahem... LARGE) codebase written in PHP4 that's running CentOS 4. Supposedly, CentOS will be updated until 2010. But how could they keep this promise if the underlying packages are no longer supported?
Guess I'll have to see what PHP5 will do to my software, thinking I could put this off for another couple years.
(sigh)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sure, why not? They're just doing whatever makes business sense. It has nothing to do with the quality or capabilities of the language.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sorry, all I have done in PHP was modify or patch other programs so I do not know much about it.
But in Java/J2EE, I still run applications that were developed (and even compiled sometimes) in java 1.0 on the java 5 platform without any changes or security issues. I see some "backward incompatible changes" in the PHP migration info.
With the java/J2EE/jsp programs I have running here and there, I sure do enjoy the care the maintainers of a language take to insure backward compatibility even if it is sometime a little more difficult and involves deprecating faulty methods and creation of equivalent with new names instead of changing the behaviour of existing methods.
So this seems strange to me but hey ! I don't want the PHP community to start throwing flames at me and java, we would quickly get outnumbered I would guess ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Or Ruby! After learnign Ruby, I never want to type a line of PHP garbage again. Python's good too, I suppose. But my experience with the Twisted framework turned me off to Python.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Microsoft sure panders to braindead customers.
I just wish it wasn't PHP..
I work for a reasonably large hosting company that held off until a few months ago to announce that we're going to PHP5 in a few weeks. Before this point, we'd had a steady trickle of 1-2 customers a month asking when we are going to PHP5. Since the announcement, we've had up to 4-5 customers a week complaining that they will leave if we dare upgrade, they can't stand companies that change things for the sake of upgrading, etc. etc. The fact is that there are a *lot* of small business websites, designed for them by some employee x years ago, which will break when we go V5 (heck, even disabling register globals screws up most of these client sites) and the customer has no employees capable of fixing it. We've been helping customers with extra hand-holding when it comes to ensuring they will be ok, but it is costing us time to support these customers, and a reasonable percentage will simply leave us a week before the swap.
I really do believe their will be massive demand for a PHP 4 only reliable host rolling their own security updates, after end of life. I know a reasonable percentage of our client base that would likely consider them...
Are you saying Microsoft is a braindead company
;)
Are you seriously asking such a question?
PHP 4 has been around for forever, and PHP 5 is so much more powerful with the new object model. I've been driving myself mad trying to ensure PHP 4 compatibility for one of my projects, and not being able to use basic OOP features like class constants and public/private/protected variables can drive you batty. It's good that someone at Zend Corp has finally stepped up to the plate and gave PHP 4 its long-deserved kick in the pants. And PHP 5 isn't that hard to migrate to, you can compile it from source and have it installed in 2 hours max with no downtime if you read the manual and know what extensions you need and how to compile them.
--Dan
Are you saying Microsoft is a braindead company for tying up with Zend to enhance PHP on Windows servers?
.NET (magnitude of better performance).
.NET migration guide.. AND they have created a tool that will take your PHP code and output C# code! Of course it doesn't always work 100% but helps a lot getting you there.
You don't know Microsoft very well, do ya. They don't partner with PHP since they like the language. Everyone knows PHP is garbage, and PHP developers worth their salt doubly so (*shameless plug* well I'm a PHP developer and I think I'm worth my salt */shameless plug*).
PHP's value is that it's everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Sometihng like 99% of the shared hosts out there run on PHP. So when you develop for PHP you gain compatibility with the rest of the world that hosts on cheap shared hosting. Same reason why people develop for Windows.
Microsoft has a plan in multiple steps and if you hang around their forums and knowledge bases you'll figure it. Ponder this, the y offer few PHP related things:
1. Making PHP run better on Windows (partnership with Zend). Many of the PHP devs already program on Windows, the goal is to get them to deploy on Windows servers as well (there are some benefits in the integration-with-dot-net-stuff department, other than that.. well nah).
2. Actively advertising PHP compilers for
3. They actually have created a PHP to
Now you see how much Microsoft loves PHP.
I know I'll get mod'd down for this (it's not off-topic, just read more carefully:), but the fact remains: With PHP 4 no longer supported, it has become clear that the typical excuses for Perl ("but it's installed on so many of my hosts that haven't seen an upgrade since 1998!") is no longer relevant. Legacy is dead! Long live PHP 5!
What exactly is so bad about PHP?
kill all the fucking niggers
Ok, lots of people hate PHP, and I can see it is ugly and encourages insecure practices. But why is so much of the most popular software for the web written in it? Consider:
CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, e107, XOOPS, various thngs with "Nuke" in their name, Geeklog...
Blog engines: Wordpress, Textpattern, Nucleus, b2evo, Serendipity..
Wiki: MediaWiki, Dokuwiki, PmWiki,...
Forums: PHPBB, Simple Machines Forums, punBB,....
Those lists could be a lot longer, I have not even listed everything I use or might use (I am trying CMS Made Simple at the moment, for example).
If PHP was so bad, surely there would be better software written in other languages would walk all over it. When I look around for software to run a site on, most of the top few choices are written in PHP. Why?
It is not hosting: there is plenty of cheap hosting for Perl, Python and, increasingly, Ruby. Even Windows and ".Net" hosting is not too expensive these days.
It is not buzz and mindshare either: Ruby has that.
It is not the existing base of software: Perl has that.
OK there is plenty of good software in other languages, but ugly, boring PHP seems to be doing very well.
If language was everything then Python and Ruby would be good, but unfortunately support and libraries are also important, so PHP and Perl are the better choice if you want something as useful as possible.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Don't worry about hosting companies. In my experience picking up multiple accounts on various Web hosts, shared hosting sites tend to avoid breaking tons of Web applications on their boxes with over 500 different sites by simply not patching them. Worse, certain hosts don't even keep a good patch management scheme or support scheme; I've seen for example Fedora Core 2 and Fedora Core 4 boxes while FC5 was nearing its EOL (FC4 being dead for months already), and any patches were hand-compiled. RHEL boxes cost money, some hosts don't want to pay for a support contract; CentOS is fairly popular in the business world because of this.
Shared or managed hosting doesn't equal security. Don't trust it.
This is a great move I think. php 5 has been out for years, superior and pretty backward compatible to php 4. Many problems in the past with 4.3/4.4 and 5.0/5.1 releases have happend due to the backward compatibility of php 5. I hope this will ease development and result in a robuster solution.
b le.phpt ion5.changes
Becasue php5 is already in the wild for years and there is still more than a year of security updates available, I think there should be time enough for migration to php5. I is also not too hard to migrate, I have done this in the last 1-2 years on many sites. There are some really annoying changes in php 5 but the php guys have documented it well [1].
Using the "Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5"[2] Documentation was very helpfull and it turned out to be pretty easy (except for scripts/applications which were already ported from php 3 and still were using php 4 backward compatibility "features").
1) http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompati
2) http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php#migra
Coinciding with this announcement is the launch of a campaign to switch major PHP-based Web applications to PHP5-only support. The GoPHP5.org website has details.
Projects supporting this move have pledged that by Feb. 5, 2008, they will no longer accept PHP4-specific changes in their codebase and that all future upgrades will assume PHP5 availability.
This doesn't mean they are rewriting all their code to OOP-style, or that they will end legacy version support for security patches, et cetera. What it means is that the developers are liberated from having to code around PHP4's limitations and can take advantage of PHP5 features for all future enhancements.
Often something that might require hundreds of lines of code in PHP4 can be done with just a few in PHP5. The SimpleXML parser is probably the best example.
Application teams already on board for this switch include Drupal, phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Symphony, Gallery, DeskPRO, and many others. Several major projects not yet committed are known to be preparing to do so.
This is most important to hosting companies as a signal that robust PHP5 support is a requirement going forward.
PHP has an easy learning curve. You can go from nothing but HTML with a simple dynamic counter, to an entire DB-backed dynamic site. The documentation for PHP is excellent. And if you're competent in any other language you can add PHP to your repertoire easily. This makes for a compelling arrangement for a large, multi-person project. Everybody from experts to duffers can contribute.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
When I look around for software to run a site on, most of the top few choices are written in PHP. Why?
If someone already has a hosting account that offers php and nothing else and they want to add another service to thier site are they going to migrate all thier services to a new host (risky)? are they going to have two seperate hosting accounts (expensive)? or are they just going to choose a php app to provide the service?
I see php on the web as similar to VB on the desktop. It provides an easy way for those who can barely program to put together stuff that sort of works and can be deployed almost anywhere. Those who can really programm then get sucked in to writing the stuff through a variety of routes (deplyoyment condierations, maintinance monkey availibility, possibility for users who can barely program to hack in thier own changes, integration with existing code and so on)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
That is my point, PHP does have genuine advantages. That i
The reason is simple: PHP makes it exceedingly easy to get away with things. Things that programming and web development newbies love because it lets them hack together a quick app. Things that experienced programmers will cringe at because they know full well that it will likely cause a headache later.
They've done some good work in stomping out these bad practices in recent times, but they still have a while to go.
I'd say it's not even support or libraries, it's being actuallyinstalled at cheap webhosts. PHP is everywhere, python and ruby - not so much.
I know lots of places still installing CentOS 4.
yum updates for Centos 4 will not upgrade your php.
Is php that full of holes that they can't continue to support it?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Every benchmark I have ever come across shows php 5.2.x vs 4.4.x is 20-30% slower.
That's another reason why people delay updating, especially on shared servers.
I have a few sites hosted through HostGator running php 4.4.4 as an Apache module. Recently they "upgraded" to phpsuexec 4.4.4 which runs as cgi. They are touting it as more secure and reliable bla bla bla.
6 f88e85e97402645b68bd0dc1be8&t=8822
Well it broke http authentication on a few pages which ruined my day.
Changelist here http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?s=1f60
Maybe it would have been better to upgrade to PHP5.
"Things that experienced programmers will cringe at because they know full well that it will likely cause a headache later."
Instead of complaining about php, "experienced programmers" can do anything with any tool. either it is PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, ASM, C/CPP. or alienian symbols. They adopt any language well enough to do anything they want. Any one who still complaining about PHP is definitely not "experienced" neither in PHP nor programming at all. because PHP is in most cases powerful enough!
China, in fact, is very fragile.
No no, Twisted is great, just has some initial learning curve (but once you get over that, it makes network programming easy). Either way, if a PHP progammer moves to Ruby or to Python, the world is a better place.
Be that as it may, it is still a boring, ugly language that I wouldn't be sad to see it go "End of Life." That's all.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
There's a plus side to that: Everyone and their mother can run a CPanel-based "host" that runs PHP. Not everyone can run a good Python or Ruby host, so most Python or Ruby hosts you find are not only knowledgeable, but passionate about Py/Rb support.
I'm not going to bother with a language flamewar, but suffice to say that I think PHP is a boring, ugly language.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
There's a lot of things fundamentally wrong with PHP. Example: references. In pretty much every language, a reference is a pointer. In PHP, a reference is a reference to an entry in the symbol table. That means you can't return an array by reference, you need to assign it to a temp variable and return the reference to the temp variable. Likewise, you can't pass in an array by reference, you need to assign it to a temp variable.
I dunno, I hear Dreamhost, the big Ruby on Rails host, really blows. If you want good support, at least for Ruby/Rails, you're much better off getting a Private Virtual Server. That way everything is just the way you want it (OS and all) and you get root access.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
For the same reason that Windows is the most popular OS. It was easy to use and available and now we're stuck with it.
Large hosting companies like it because its an easy way to give a scripting language to their customers. Everyone now uses it so the hosting companies arent' going to switch.
The big CMS folks that you mentioned were smart to use PHP since that's what all the hosting companies have. Not to mention that those projects started out as open source projects probably by people who didn't have a lot of programming experience and PHP is easy to learn and forgiving in terms of mistakes (far too forgiving IMHO)
Personally I can't stand any of the packages you've mentioned. Sure they're great for putting up your blog but you wouldn't believe how many customers I get who want wizz-bang sites built on top of one of those, when a custom solutions would be so much easier.
The Anti-Blog
Dreamhost lets you install pretty much anything you want in your ~/. If you don't like Dreamhost's RoR chain, install your own. No need for root either.
(I had to do this to get Catalyst installed, since Dreamhost's perl didn't include it)
After all, I am strangely colored.
But you don't have any control over the web server software, AFAIK. That can be very important to getting a Rails app running just the way you need/want.
I think one of the reasons PHP is so universal is that it is dead simple to setup. Just install mod_php and you're pretty much done. Other languages and frameworks are a lot more complicated.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
But as web pages became more complex, soft typing, lack of proper scope, and lack of OOP patterns made developing complex PHP applications a world of horror.
I have yet to see a good example of an OOP framework noticably improving code maintenence over a procedural equivalent for the type of apps where PHP is usually used.
That being said, a lot of the incompatibility between 4 and 5 is a revising and cleaning up of the PHP OOP model to better reflect Java's approach to OO, and tuning for heavier OO use. Since Java was an OO-centric language from the start, it didnt' have this issue.
It would be like trying to incrimentally bolt on Functional Programming (like Higher Order Functions) constructs onto Java. If after a point your realize the hacked-on FP model stunk, you would have to create versioning problems to revamp it to do it right. Perhaps if Java decides to clean up its meta-model, it would have similer problems. This is because Java's meta-model was not given much thought early on, remaining a weak-point of Java.
Table-ized A.I.
Tiger shipped with PHP4 installed, and there is basically one guy, Mark Linyage, who is packaging a PHP5 installer for Tiger.
:-/
Unfortunately, he refuses to support older versions of Mac OS, and for various reasons I'm still working with Panther on my laptop and some of our servers, so I have been struggling mightily to get PHP5 to compile and install.
I wish Apple would provide some support for these 'freebies' they include with the OS, but their attitude seems to be "if we didn't invent it, it's not our problem."
- Nick
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
It's too street to have any snob value.
The linguistically nouveau riche, who have recently tried to score a little upward social mobility by learning some Python or Ruby, resent nothing more than the teeming masses of hungry PHP developers underbidding them.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I'm not going to refute that, but I will say that it is possible to be both a hipster and correct.
Sure, everything you mentioned works "ok".. But have you actually checked their codebases? World of horror. They don't even comment their horror properly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- lack of decent module namespacing. Everything lives in the same global scope, which means any public module needs to "hack" this in with naming conventions, such as pg_{connect|query|execute} instead of language-supported alternatives such as pg.connect or pg::connect
- interpreter weaknesses. Only recently has it been possible to chain method calls such as $a->getFoo()->doBar(), and it's still not possible to do something like $a->results()[0]. The result is (IMO) unnecessary temporary variables, which end up being the bane of literate programming. Plus, now that I've been spoiled by Python and Lua's abilities to pass in named parameters to functions, it's frustrating to not have that anymore (e.g. x = Window(x=100, y=100, width=200, height=200), which is much easier to understand sans reference than $x = Window(100, 100, 200, 200))
- frustratingly bad precedence rules for short-circuit operators. Consider this:
This is an AWFUL gotcha. I can't think of any benefit to justify the behavior. Backwards compatibility should be deliberately broken to fix this.
- the typical arguments about poor function standardization. I won't elaborate on them.
- Poor coordination between PHP core and PEAR/PECL repositories. I've seen a lot of buck-passing between the two camps. PEAR is treated both as a core part of successful project libraries and as a completely independent repository, depending on whichever is more convenient at the time.
- Poor version-numbering schemes. Major behavior changes occur during minor revisions, and changelogs don't always do a good job of explaining the impact of certain revisions.
- Poor default error-handling. I can override the default error handler myself, but there are certain failures that can't be overridden (a command-line switch to say "treat all errors as exceptions" would be nice).
- Community encouragement of subpar programming practices. PHP/*SQL tutorials are still being written that show gaping injection vulnerabilities. Everyone writing a web framework seems obsessed with the Front Controller design pattern, without realizing that Apache/Lighttpd is the Front Controller [note: Rasmus Lerdorf is awesome in this regard]. Some people even try to relive other languages within PHP, emulating Java's XML-everything-configuration whilst completely forgetting how that works in Java, when the configuration is loaded once for the lifetime of the server, instead of every page load.
Whooh. That's a lot of reasons to dislike PHP. I still love it, though, because the language provides the best way I've seen thus far to evolve a project from a static web page to a full-blown application in baby steps. Most other languages rely on fairly heavy web frameworks, which gain a lot of power at the expense of a huge jump in complexity. With a PHP project, I can choose my own level of complexity. IMO, that's the greatest strength of PHP. The ability to use it however I want.The same could be said of C (vs. Lisp). The subject has been talked about plenty before, under the label Worse is Better. The general idea is similar to time-to-market. A product (in this case, a language / compiler) doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. The perfect solution will always fail to be the popular solution, because of the effort required to produce it.
Now, that doesn't mean that the popular solution really is better. Paul Graham made a killing with Lisp specifically because he went against the popular solution at the time. It's no wonder that Lisp and Smalltalk are more popular in the academic community than in the professional (where Java is the order of the day... blechhh).
The reason that Windows is the most popular operating system is because at the time it was the most friendly and well known alternative available at a cheap price. The alternatives, OS/2 and Mac OS X, were both priced more than Windows. There are accounts of people buying Windows without having a computer to run it, and very many where they had a computer that wasn't capable of running it. Advertising made Windows popular and ensured its dominance once everyone learnt Windows. These days I have asked some about spending a month in Windows and then a month in Linux. They compare the two that Linux was easier to learn and work out. I'm not sure if its just that they've done Windows and getting the concepts is easier or if its that Windows has more inconsistencies (doubtful) but to state that the reason PHP is popular is because Windows is popular is a massive over simplification of the situation.
I always wondered where this setting was...
Congratulations... you've not only managed to miss the point, you've also completely missed the reason Windows is popular in the first place!
The parent is not saying that PHP is popular because Windows is popular, he was making an analogy. PHP, like Windows, is A) clumsy but easy enough to use and B) comes pre-installed.
The reason Windows is popular is similar - OS/2 had to be installed after the fact, on a machine whose purchase price already included a Windows license. Mac OS X was far from being released when Windows gained its foothold (around 1995... Windows 95 anyone?) and it was not significantly cheaper than the then-current Mac OS. Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.5 both sold for about $95 at the time. The key issue being that you couldn't run Mac OS on a PC.
Windows became popular because Microsoft had the leverage to impose exclusive deals on the PC manufacturers, and most businesses needed PC software, not Mac. Windows 95 had pretty much caught up to Mac in ease of use, but that didn't really matter. It would have been a hit anyway, because it was the only reasonably-priced OS for PCs that ran all the software businesses most needed.
And congratulations AC you've missed my point in that PHP without any major marketing campaign came to this point overtaking other rival technologies such as Perl (no major price differential, still installed on a lot of systems even today) has become a dominant technology without even using all of those dirty underhanded methods that Microsoft used to secure its place. The Mac OS software remains comparable (and now with Leopard cheaper for the feature set than Windows) but it was in fact the cost of the hardware that you had to buy from Apple that made is significantly more expensive than a cheap IBM compatible PC. It is similar with since OS/2 was in fact available before Windows, so I fail to see where a Windows license comes in, however IBM would happily sell you OS/2 on their workstations without having to pay for a Windows license, but again this was more expensive than the Windows alternative. But congratulations your last paragraph exemplifies why comparing it to Windows is in a sense flawed. Why do businesses like PC's? Because they were cheaper than the alternatives. But hey in a small way it seems like we're arguing over the semantics of the same point.
I always wondered where this setting was...
I understand you people keep commplaining about some legacy defects of PHP. Legendary monsters like "Magic Quotes", lack of native UTF8 support, "interpreted", "weak typed", and a lair of countless functions are worst enemies of you noble architects of codes.
But in my real world, text-based web applications need very few of those acadamical design. The PHP official website hosts , for example, not a full-featured MVC frameworks, but a template engine called Smarty, which is roughly an equivent to the View part of the classical MVC pattern. Why so? Because in PHP applications, Models are mostly nothing but SQL queries and largely can be mixed with the Controllers. So, we all can see in PHP world, people concerns more about HTML output than the church-like academical, mysterious code behind webpages in languages like Java. This output-centred way of programing could be the reason why PHP has more beautiful, creative websites than any other programming language. Lets just count those Forum, Wiki, CMS, On-line Shop products. All-mighty Java on the other hand always has industrial beauty in its code, but has very few web application/website that is received as beautiful, or reusable on the context level..
In its design, PHP script needs to be excuted in a very short time(better in millisecond). the longer the worse performance is. PHP's not a right language for tasks like encoding or decoding some video clips, nor is any other scirpting language. So the complex logics which need multi-layer abstraction with classes and objects from mechanical level calls to device to business logic simply do not fit for PHP. PHP's job is doing mainly top-level business logics with texts(T from HTML). And for business logics, even the real braindead language like VBS can handle them very well, not to mention it is PHP which does support OOP. Wise asses should pick the right tool for the right job.
To those who favors Python, Perl, or Ruby, i just say those languages don't have an unified, universal solution as PHP gives us.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
A good PHPer should write codes that works in both PHP4 and PHP5.
It's not hard. Normally code which runs good in STRICT error reporting mode of PHP4 can run under PHP5 without changes.
I have been doing this for three years. My local development evironment is the lastest PHP5.2x+ Mysql6.x beta + apache 2.2
but my deploy evironment is still in PHP4.x. My code works fine all the time;
China, in fact, is very fragile.
Sorry I missed it. Are you sure you made that point?? I can't seem to find it in your post.
Ah, but you didn't say "Macs were priced more than Windows PCs," you said "The alternatives, OS/2 and Mac OS X, were both priced more than Windows." Which is wrong on two counts, so try to be more specific, please.
Nope. OS/2 shipped in December 1987, at which time Windows 2.0 was already on the shelves. OS/2 didn't even get a GUI until a year later, so it wasn't really a comparable alternative.
If you're trying to establish Windows' success as a cheap alternative, you can't really include IBM machines because users on a budget would buy a cheaper PC clone rather than an IBM. Microsoft was in a position to tell these manufacturers (who needed Windows) "if you want Windows, you won't ship machines pre-loaded with anything else." That accounted for a hell of a lot more sales than the advertising.
That, and they ran the apps that businesses needed, like Lotus 1-2-3. I think the original poster's comparison is correct in this regard; a lot of PHP's success comes from the free availability of web apps already written in it, and hosts with PHP already installed, but you didn't really address that point. And frankly, if you don't get your facts straight, it's hard to put much faith in your analysis.
- Neal
I don't think I said that PHP is popular because Windows is popular. I said its popular for the same reasons. Also Microsoft didn't really use dirty underhanded tactics until after they became a monopoly. Windows spread yes because of price and secondly because of ease of use and easy to develop for (no pesky security concerns to worry about).
:) ). Perl isn't forgiving of errors. PHP is. CGI scripts in Perl can cause a lot of overhead on a system, so especially when hardware was more expensive the shared hosting companies wanted something else. Unfortunately mod_perl is tied directly into Apache, making it insecure for shared hosting (the memory is shared) so PHP was the natural choice.
Yes PHP and Perl are both free, but look at cost of development. (ignoring the fact that a good PHP developer that will do your program right the first time is going to be as much as the Perl guy
Basically just like Windows, PHP was in the right place at the right time. Easier learning curve, easier deployment on a shared hosting environment and cheaper developers. It dominates because of that, not because its a superior product.
The Anti-Blog
Read James Wallace and Jim Erickson's book Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, and you'll see how Microsoft played dirty from the very beginning, screwing basically any company that got in their way and many that tried to cooperate with them. The only thing that changed is their grasp eventually expanded to meet their reach.
- Neal
It's a buggy implementation of a poor design; even if you get your head round the braindeadedness of how things are supposed to work, you still find that there are parts of the language which don't even manage to work at that level...
(For reference, I work with PHP for a living ;_;)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Have you tried using Ruby, Perl or Python without one of their great big frameworks? You can still write simple PHP-like code in a language that doesn't suck.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
I have a client with several hundred websites, many of which were done in the late 90s and early 00's on PHP3. Many of them break in PHP4 in some way or another unless you enable all the insecure compatibility stuff. Moving to PHP5 breaks most of them in very bad ways. The cost of updating several hundred websites, each written by different developer(s), sometimes changed by different people over a period of years, developed mostly by overseas contractors working for nothing, and most originally developed for PHP3 is absolutely insane.
.NET, which seems (for now at least) to maintain a reasonable level of security and compatibility across multiple versions over several years. Granted PHP has gone from a broken hobbiest toy to a more professional, more secure platform since PHP3, but how much of what is written in PHP5 will be broken entirely in PHP7 a couple of years down the line? How many times do I have to go back and re-write the same thing because the methods that were so great at the time were found to be horribly insecure?
.NET unless it's something ridiculously small. Frankly, unless PHP can establish a long-term (where 'long-term' means longer than 3-4 years) framework of usable and secure methods, it's going to burn itself. In other words, unless PHP5's methods are usable and securable in 2009, it cannot remain a major force in anything other than hobbiest sites and the sites of those who just plain don't know any better. ColdFusion's death came far more swiftly than it should have due to the fact that once you moved up a couple of versions, major parts of your applications began to break. That's unheard of in HTML, C/C++, or most other things in the software world.
Thus the client remains on (now unsupported) PHP4 with some insecure settings in place to support the broken PHP3 stuff, and has essentially no path for a feasible upgrade. All this makes me less likely to do future projects in PHP and more likely to do them in
I'm not claiming any one thing is the be-all, end-all, perfect solutions; merely pointing out that PHP's track record thus far is not making me particularly comfortable with continuing to use it in any significant way. Anything I can do in PHP I can now do faster and easier in
The idea of "get it today and it's obsolete tomorrow" is fine for hardware; not for software.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."