Official Support For PHP 4 Ends 245
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."
You're about a year late (Score:0, Informative)
PHP 4 End of Life Announcement [slashdot.org] (July 14, 2007)
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory post (Score:3, Informative)
For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life.
I'd like to propose that Slashdot "editors" be stripped of that title, and from now on be referred to simply as "approvers" - there's obviously no editing involved in the job at all.
Official "Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5" document (Score:5, Informative)
http://docs.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php [php.net]
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.
Re:Fact check please? (Score:3, Informative)
Ubersmith.
They provide billing automation and equipment management for lots of hosting companies and datacenters. They said that they're supposedly "working" on a PHP5 version, but that statement was said months ago.
Notice "Ubersmith does not support PHP 5.x at this time" on the order pages of both:
http://www.ubersmith.com/products/pro/order.php [ubersmith.com] and
http://www.ubersmith.com/products/lite/order.php [ubersmith.com]
From the looks of their blog, their appliance version supports PHP5, but not so sure about the self-hosted version.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:3, Informative)
In PHP4 objects are passed by value. In PHP5 they're passed by reference.
In PHP5 you also have public, private, and protected variables.
In PHP4 class constructors were the same name as the class. In PHP5 it's __construct.
I could go on about the difference, but I won't. There's a lot of differences between the two.
I'm glad PHP4 has reached EOL.
Re:Good time to migrate to PHP 7... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah. Even without the frameworks, I like mod_python a whole lot more than PHP. PHP seems like a bunch of nasty hacks to me.
Re:Flash 9 (Score:1, Informative)
The latest version of Actionscript (Actionscript 3) is very similar to Java (no, not Javascript), and even uses the Java compiler and runs on the JVM.
It uses custom runtime, not JVM. The Flex AS3 compiler is written in Java (as Flex is an Eclipse plugin), but the Flex compiler and the Java compiler don't share anything.
Re:Good to see... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:(correction, should be "overhyped") (Score:2, Informative)
Re:As a big fan of PHP who cut his teeth on PHP4 . (Score:3, Informative)
"Bug" is more concise than "a software flaw which causes behavior the developers didn't intend"
It's also due to the fact that early in the history of computing, a fault was found to be due to a moth being trapped between the contacts of a relay [worldwidewords.org].
For what it's worth, I don't like people calling the Internet "the Cloud" either.
Re:wow FUDSTER (Score:2, Informative)
In PHP4 objects are passed by value. In PHP5 they're passed by reference.
This is probably one of the most misunderstood features of PHP5. They are passed by reference, but they're also copy-on-write references. As soon as the variables value is changed, a copy is made, and the function/method then uses the local copy (as if a copy were made in the first place like in php4).
Nothing has changed for the programmer except a reduction in memory usage.
In PHP5 you also have public, private, and protected variables.
Yes, optional. The old var keyword works the same as using public.
In PHP4 class constructors were the same name as the class. In PHP5 it's __construct.
Again, optional. There is also a __destruct() method in php5.
I could go on about the difference, but I won't. There's a lot of differences between the two.
There are a lot of differences, but backwards compatibility is pretty good. A coworker and I converted a 130k loc mess of a php4 codebase (originally php3) from 4.3 to 5.1 with only a handful of changes. It just took a bit of research and a bit of planning.
And yes, good riddance to php4. It will not be missed.