PHP 4 Rides into the Sunset
It’s the end of the road for PHP4 — 8/8/08 marked the cutoff date for continued support of PHP 4. This weekend’s release of PHP 4.4.9 marks the final update for the 4.x line and as of now, PHP 5 is the recommended option.
In many ways the official demise of PHP 4 may be a good thing since it might help nudge reluctant developers and web hosts to start upgrading to PHP5. The downside, however, is that there are still many widely used libraries and applications that require PHP 4. Due to significant design changes, PHP 5 is not backwards compatible with PHP 4.
As one commenter points out on Reddit, “going from PHP 4 to PHP 5 requires work, and knowledge… there are many PHP apps being maintained by folks who simply don’t have the knowledge or time to rewrite them.”
Whether the demise of PHP 4 will encourage such developers to start porting their apps to PHP 5 remains to be seen.
Although PHP is often criticized for its large number of built-in functions (PHP’s function number in the 3000+ range, Python by contrast, has a mere 133) and its lack of namespace support, the language is widely available and powers some of the more popular sites on the web. For example Flickr, Facebook and Wikipedia are all powered by PHP.
For those who can’t or don’t want to migrate to the newer versions of PHP, Suhosin, a hardened PHP project will reportedly continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line.
See Also:
