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."

Thank God

[Daengbo]

I hope that everyone has moved beyond PHP 4.X by this point. 5.X is more secure and capable.

Needed But Will Be Troublesome

[detain]

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.

Re:If only...

[misleb]

Are you saying Microsoft is a braindead company for tying up with Zend to enhance PHP on Windows servers?

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

Seems strange to me

[ls671]

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 ;-)

Re:Seems strange to me

[1110110001]

PHP5 could not continue backward compatability, PHP had to break backwards compatibility, ...

I keep reading this and am wondering if you ever ported code from PHP4 to PHP5. I did it with a bigger project and the only problem I had was, that someone had uses StdClass without creating an empty instance first. Took about a day to fix that. It's nothing like VB6 vs. VB.NET.

a good PHPer should write

[imkow]

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;