“PHP 4, deployed on tens of millions of servers globally, is among the most successful languages of all time. But its run is coming to an end. Active development for the scripting language has been discontinued and security updates will conclude in August. And for some developers, PHP 4 will be history before Valentine’s Day. On February 5, a group of influential Open Source projects will collectively stop all new development on their respectively platforms using PHP 4. However, there are still some holdouts opposing a complete transition to PHP 5 and it’s not entirely clear whether or not PHP 4 will ever truly disappear.”
If the twits in charge would’ve just made it possible to have both PHP4 and PHP5 running in parallel this wouldn’t be such a problem. Then we’d be able to migrate applications one at a time to the latest version.
You _can_ have PHP4 and PHP5 running on the same server. I believe letting PHP4 die is a good thing. PHP5 has been around for years now and we can’t waste the developers time with legacy stuff. But I don’t believe PHP4 will die, because many are interested in it. Maintaining PHP4 and legacy PHP4 apps could lead up to some very interesting business opportunities for third party companies and developers.
Uhmm, no. You can have one as mod and the other as cgi. But not both mod (the way almost everyone runs php) at the same time. Thus, conversion is not as easy as it should be. (Or maybe not even possible.) Might there be some function available in one version that doesn’t exist in the other, and then there are the associated performance issues.
Just think what would happen if Oracle or MS said “You can only have one DB engine active at a time.”, I can tell you what would happen, no upgrades.
You can quite easily run both as fcgi. That is a better setup than running one as cgi and the other as mod. Running PHP as fcgi is, for multidomains, a better setup which gives you additional security possibilities that running PHP as a mod doesn’t give and geee, is that needed or what.
Long live Ruby
If you mean that in the sense that they said it to Napoleon on his return from Elba, then yes. Otherwise, I hope not.
Ruby isn’t even alive yet
PHP is dead – long live PHP!
Running both versions is imho unwanted. This makes people lazy for taking steps to migrate. It’s known for more then one year that php4 will be ended this year.
We migrated all our customers to PHP 5 last year. And we gave customers one year time to migrate there scripts. And btw of the 15.000 customers of us only 50 people had problems with PHP 5. Mostly because they were using this *EXPERIMENTAL* dom-xml stuff.
There’s actually a lot of things they could have had trouble with in moving to PHP5. I imagine their scripts weren’t very extensive.
I am just finishing moving my companies code to work with PHP5 from PHP4 (and with register_globals off…
). It actually wasn’t too damn. A few instances of domxml. Some issues with implementation of the __call method (it differs between 4 and 5 yet that isnt documented), nusoap (named soapclient), etc.
The real bitch was fixing the code to work with register_globals off (and error_reporting set to E_ALL for most of the code).
We’re developing a new platform now though and it’s going to be developed strictly on PHP5 with E_STRICT on. Thank god.
The good thing about this is all the work we get paid to do. First they paid us for writing systems in <PHP4, then they paid us for maintaining them, and then for migrating them to PHP4, and now we get paid to migrate their systems to PHP5
… aaahh the miracle of the never ending software upgrade cycle 
If you look at what the PHP developers are talking about and developing activly at the moment, it’s all about PHP 6. I think that a lot of PHP 4 people are going to move directly to PHP 6, and given the lack of stablity in the 5.x branch, I think this is probably a good thing for those people.