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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.
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/
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.
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...
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.