PHP is (soon) dead. Long live PHP!
The PHP Group has announced the End of Life of PHP 4 — at last! The announcement reads:
The PHP development team hereby announces 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. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
While PHP 4 is a crufty scripting language, PHP 5 is quite nice programming language with good support for database access, web services, XML parsing, exception handling, iterators and other goodies. But first and foremost, PHP finally got descent support for object oriented programming with its version 5.
Given all the good with PHP 5 and all the bad with PHP 4 it is surprising to see how slow the adoption of PHP 5 has been. Three years after it was released, PHP 5 commands less than 20 % of PHP’s install base. How come?
The poor adoption of PHP 5 is because virtual all hosting companies offer PHP 4 while only few of them offer PHP 5. The reasons that only few offer PHP 5 is that there is not demand enough for it. Their customers are not programmers but regular users who do not care which version of PHP their favorite program is running as long as it works. And since all important PHP based application, like Drupal, WordPress, Gallerey, phpBB and phpMyAdmin, are running on PHP 4, there is no demand for PHP 5. So why are these applications still supporting PHP 4 when PHP 5 is so much better? Because there is too few hosting companies offering PHP 5. Catch-22!
To get out of this catch-22, several important PHP software projects has agreed to require at least PHP 5.2.0 not later than February 5th, 2008.
Now, with both The PHP Group and many PHP software projects pushing to replace PHP 4 with PHP 5, we will hopefully soon be able to proclaim:
PHP is dead. Long live PHP!
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