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Official Support For PHP 4 Ends
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Aug 10, 2008 09:58 PM
from the we-actually-knew-ye-pretty-well dept.
from the we-actually-knew-ye-pretty-well dept.
Da Massive writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued. ...With eight years of legacy code out there, it is likely that there are going to be a fairly large number of systems that will not migrate to PHP 5 in the near future, and a reasonable proportion of those that will not make the migration at all. For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP, noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product."
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Now that magic quotes are off by default... (Score:5, Funny)
FRIST PSOT!!!!!'); DELETE FROM replies WHERE reply != 'FRIST PSOT!!!!!'; --
PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by. (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer this quote [reddit.com]:
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As a big fan of PHP who cut his teeth on PHP4 .. (Score:5, Informative)
Let me also say they're wrong about legacy systems being slow to migrate: PHP5 runs PHP4 code just fine (notwithstanding a few copy-on-write and unassigned reference issues, which are very easy to fix).
PHP5, in this context, would be better called "Zend Engine 2", since that's what the real update is. PHP4 the language is essentially just a subset of PHP5.
Incidentally (perhaps) the phpMyAdmin 3.0.0 beta just came out yesterday which sacrifices Zend Engine 1 (PHP4) support. It also drops MySQL 4 support, and I think lots of projects will follow suit; PHP4 is going to drag MySQL 4 with it, which is also great.
Fact check please? (Score:5, Interesting)
I question the validity of these assumptions. My first salaried job was programming PHP/FI 2 (1998). I cannot find a single product I have been involved with or even used in the past (which contains PHP code), that hasn't upgraded. Systems written in PHP could only benefit from the improvements in 5 and there's almost nothing written in PHP that's so critical* that it wouldn't be upgraded by the current developers or new developers trained in 5.
*This is both a side effect of the language design and the people who write it.
Can someone give some examples of products stuck in 4.0?
Official "Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5" document (Score:5, Informative)
http://docs.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php [php.net]
You know what? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know what? I'm sick and tired of the fact that every PHP related post to Slashdot ends up sludgefest of old jokes, one-line jabs at PHP, and misinformation.
Official ending of PHP4 support is a big thing in the PHP community. If you're a reader of Planet-PHP, you'll know this; for almost all of 08/08/08 there was nothing but end-of-life celebrations from the bloggers. The community has done an exceptional job at getting developers, open-source projects and hosters alike to migrate to PHP5 for such a heavily used language. And we will have to surmount even bigger difficulties for PHP6 and Unicode, which unlike PHP5, breaks backwards compatibility with any project that treats strings as binary data. Migrating PHP4 to PHP5 is not difficult; often it's as simple as an edit to the server migration. PHP6 will definitely demand code changes.
For those of us who use and "have to deal with" (yes, we have our annoyances too) with PHP on a daily basis, this is good news. For the rest of you, please contribute something meaningful, or forever hold your peace.
Upgrading is not that hard... (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to PHP5 quite a while back. I started with 4 and had already been programing nice (long tags in html, program with globals off, etc.) so there was no issue for me, everything just worked on 5. I do have one script I found on sourceforge (dead project) that doesn't work on 5, probably used something deprecated from 3 slated for removal after 4. I don't expect conversion of that to be too serious either.
I think a lot of the FUD is being placed on ISPs who run PHP4 servers and may have outdated cpanels or other pre-set PHP apps. I would think maybe a weeks worth of work for most mom and pops to get the upgrade complete (a lot it setting up automating on any data upgrade conversions) but it's surely not the end of the world.
Go PHP 5! (Score:5, Interesting)
For those wondering how many projects will be left out in the cold, here's your answer:
http://gophp5.org/ [gophp5.org]
Over 100 PHP projects and products and over 200 web hosts that have been committed to PHP 5.2 and no earlier for over a year. GoPHP5 launched before the PHP development team announced an EOL for PHP 4. While I don't believe for a second that it was the only reason they made that decision, I also don't believe for a second that it didn't have a big influence on it.
The push to drop PHP 4 support came from people using PHP in production in the first place. Those of us who get paid to write PHP code are cheering at the top of our lungs, because now we can actually get real work done.
Go PHP 5!
Migration woes (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a lot of people saying that they're surprised anyone's still using PHP 4, when PHP 5 has been out for so long. Well, I can guarantee you there's a lot of legacy PHP 4 codebases out there; converting to 5 is not always as easy as going over what's in the migration page on php.net [php.net]. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, we have tends of thousands of code files spread across numerous systems; our live web pool is around 100 machines, and we cannot take the website down in order to update it. (I can't tell you why.) So updates have to be made live. We don't have a proper staging environment, either, but we have come up with a number of (horrible) mechanisms for dealing with this situation.
In our particular (unfortunate) case, we had about half a dozen custom PHP extensions that were all written by our former CTO, who left the company about a year and a half ago. He wasn't really big into documentation, and our technical management was very poor; we had a guy go through our 65,000-file codebase and make all the little tweaks necessary for a vanilla 4-to-5 migration, but it took us six months of wrangling with all these extensions to get them to work well under 5.1 (we're still having trouble with 5.2).
Plus, it's not just a matter of dealing with the technology; like a lot of companies, management here doesn't like to put resources into things that don't have visible benefits -- and cleaning up the codebase/rebuilding the dev environment just isn't something they see a lot of value in. (We've finally convinced them it's important and needs to be done; we're operating without source control for about 99% of our code. YES, I KNOW.) We didn't even seriously start pushing to get things up to PHP 5 until January, and it took until July to actually make it happen.
The point is, mismanagement and bad development environment/codebase design early on (several years ago) have meant that we're upgrading to PHP 5 years later than we should have. It's not that we didn't know how to do it once we decided to.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:5, Informative)
PHP 4 was released in 2000 and is finally getting an EOL date but is still going to receive patches. Microsoft XP was released in 2001 and its EOL date is 2009, with security patches until 2014.
Technically the EOL was announced in 2007, and it was the beginning of 2008. What ends today is official security patch support.
The patches offered by Mr. Esser are not official, though I'd say he's more than qualified for the job.
Overall, especially for an open source project, I'd say the transition was handled pretty well. What's worrying me more is where the new versions are heading, but that's another discussion.
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Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:5, Insightful)
People will still be allowed to get PHP 4 after it is EOL'd.
Try buying a new copy of XP now. Even getting a computer with XP (and not paying for Vista) is getting difficult now.
That is the difference.
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Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:4, Informative)
I can buy a copy of XP, upgrade or full install, retail or OEM at newegg with no problems.
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Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:4, Insightful)
And I can build PHP4 or PHP5 from source, or intall binaries, without sending any money at all to Newegg.
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Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:5, Interesting)
Where did you get your php info? foreach was introduced in PHP4, eval as well for error catching.
The object support was nasty, but still better then the pseudo-object crap that perl has. Neither has private objects and vars outside of normal scoping but at least php didn't require passing extra arguments and shifting them out via a pseudo-constructor.
Also, you could type cast in php4 as well.
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Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:5, Funny)
Where did you get your php info?
I get mine from phpinfo();
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Re:OOP is Overyped (Score:5, Interesting)
OOP is not overhyped. Just misunderstood. PHP4's object model really was a bit nasty, as evidenced by the projects that jumped into using it before they understood how it was meant to work (e.g., oscommerce).
Decent example of php5 (zf, in fact) e-commerce (bleh): Magento [magentocommerce.com], 2008 sourceforge best new project.
The reason that there is a lot of procedural php4 code out there is that the older api's don't make sense in php5's paradigm. With the millions of people used to writing to api's like Drupal's or Wordpress's, the change was glacial.
But it is totally clear: PHP5 better than PHP4. OOP good.
Note: I am a former Dijkstra devotee. I've heard every argument you can imagine against OOP.
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Re:OOP is Overhyped (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many 1000+ page books on the subject. I think this question is beyond the scope of a slashdot comment. But, as a taste: More literate and intuitive api's. Type safety. MVC.
Specifically about Magento: It uses a framework that has been systematically tested (another advantage of oop) and is based on the MVC + Front Controller paradigm for web apps. It went from whiteboard to working in 3 months. It's simple to extend.
Regarding what changed my mind about OOP: I learned to use OOP techniques. I never had any negative feelings towards OOP, I was just in love with single-in/single-out purity of the old ways.
OOP is great for my shop. Of course you can accomplish the same result, theoretically, with any two complete languages/paradigms. The question is whether you want anyone else to read your code (or whether you want to be able to read it in 6 months), how long you want to take writing/researching it, what your requirements are for code quality, and what kind of environment you want to work in if you're on a team. Obviously, if it's just you and you have eternity to write and debug your application, then oop doesn't offer any advantages.
My advice is just to try it out. You can use your Dijkstra-fu inside of methods and in novel data structures, while at the same time experiencing the convenience and consistency of magic axiomatic things like "programming to an interface." It took me a few months of mind-destroying pain to change the way I built a program, but it is very much worth it. Apologies if you've heard this advice before.
Btw, you sound like you probably know a lot more about Djikstra than I do. :) There are so many ways... OOP is now just a another tool for me. The paradigm that has taken its place as my ocd target is functional languages like Haskell.
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Re:Backward Compatability (Score:5, Informative)
I feel like this is only even a story at all because valid PHP 4 code isn't necessarily valid PHP 5 code.
Curious choices by the PHP folks to me, but I'm not really deeply invested enough in PHP to fairly call them good or bad.
The reason for those curious choices was the even more curious choices in the languages design in earlier versions. I would say however, that even the best design gets outdated in time, and it's better to sacrafice compatibility at some point.
Key web-related technologies have reinvented themselves and it's hard to say where they would be if they didn't do so. ASP.NET (vs. old ASP) comes to mind, which was a radical rearchitecture. Flash is another example (on the client side), which almost completely rewrote their rendering stack in version 8, and completely rewrote their script runtime stack in Flash 9.
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Re:Good to see... (Score:5, Funny)
Now if only they'd let the current version die too, we'd really be making progress..
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Re:Good to see... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:By Neruos (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:By Neruos (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean, an african or an european car?
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Re:Good time to migrate to PHP 7... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Obi-Wan (Score:4, Funny)
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