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 PHP 5 offering a viable upgrade path for the last few years, the recommendation is for addministrators and developers is to move to the PHP 5 platform (if they haven’t already done so), which is currently at 5.2.6. 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.
I think it should be
‘PHP 4 is Dead, Long Live PHP 5‘
or are you trying to say that PHP 5 is the same thing as PHP 4?
more like “the queen is dead, long live the queen”
so it is right as posted above.
Why not “PHP is dead, Long Live PHP” instead?
becase PHP4 will live on even though it’s “dead”.
When Software dies, there’s often a scramble to keep it alive (through unofficial means).
What the title means is that now PHP4 is dead, may it live for long through the community.
We had a few projects written in PHP 4. I must say that our transition to PHP 5 was fast and flawless. Just refer to the documentation on their website with some testing you will be all set.
I am looking forward to PHP6!
I am looking forward to PHP6!
I liked PHP 4. I use it on my own site but all the companies I have worked for (financial, banking) in the U.S. use Java based frameworks. I always liked the ease of stringing together PHP code. I once brought it up at a meeting and was was shot down with “it doesn’t scale well, security holes, lacks JIT for our Solaris servers.” It amazed me how well entrenched Java is in U.S. financial companies. Perhaps PHP 6 will offer an alternative to enterprise Java use.
A common myth used by people who don’t understand what scaleability IS.
The number of system level security issues is low – 99.99% of all ‘security holes’ in php applications come because the person writing the code had no clue what they were doing. (see WordPress, it won a pwnie for a reason)
Because spending time compiling on every execution is SO efficient – especially with the piss poor caching model that often lets php applications run FASTER if your userbase repeatedly sends the same requests.
It is suprising given that everything you just said they listed as problems with PHP generally go double for Java (I don’t trust Java as far as I could throw Caliph Singh – AKA “The Great Khali”) But you have to look at it’s strengths.
Though for financial I can see a good reason – Java excels at serving multiple UNIQUE calls back to back. If the number of times users call up data in a row is calling up different data and results, Java will win. Financial institutions rarely run the same queries over and over again – one persons financial accounts, a single running total for just one section, etc, etc.
PHP with the SQL of your choice is at the strongest when you keep serving the SAME data over and over again where caching models can really make a difference. Take a forums where 90%+ of your visitors are going to be reading and re-reading the same posts. This will often hit the cache (especially if you ad a secondary cache like eAccellerator, Memcached, Zend Accellerator) for the output/results instead of running code, resulting in faster throughput.
Basically it’s part of why you see a lot of forums and websites done in PHP, and few if any done in Java.
Though it would help explain why Banking websites get down on their knees in front of the donkey – because if they’re java back-ended it’s unlikely they even know what HTML is, much less good programming practices.
Edited 2008-08-12 08:40 UTC
While all undeniably true, PHP4 did make it a lot easier to write unsecure code. PHP4 also made it very easy for people with “no clue” to write seemingly fully functional web apps.
PHP4 often offered up an easy, obvious and very insecure way to solve most problems, while the secure way was often harder and more obscure. One of the big changes in PHP5 is that many of those easy, obvious and insecure ways of coding are no impossible (at least by default).
As long as you don’t use the old session functions or the long depreciated superglobals, transitioning the vast majority of code (average sites and functions) from PHP 4 to 5 is trivial, in my experience.
Five years back I found my way into programming via PHP4. Eventually I tought myself other programming languages and discovered Object Oriented Design. And along came PHP5…
I have never looked back to PHP4 since. I will be glad the day PHP4 and code written with it disappears for good. All the little nuances (read: annoyances) of PHP4 drove me absolutely nuts at times.
Now I just hope the current trend of Java’fication (sane coding with OO in mind, good documentation, good coding and naming conventions) of PHP continues, and people having to bear the cross of the POS that are the standard libraries of PHP will eventually be lead to the land of OO. Not to mention the horrible, HORRIBLE support for multibyte character sets (of the standard libraries).
I am hoping with the “death” of PHP4, the death of certain pieces of PEAR and the rise of the SPL and the Zend Framework will follow. Not only in the minds of developers, but also system administrators stopping to refuse to provide them.
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Ack! Why would we want PHP to emulate Java when much saner choices are available, like Ruby, Python, even Javascript? PHP is a scripting language, and Java is not. If PHP programming turns into the giant bureaucracy that Java is, it will lose. If anything PHP needs less, not more. Keep it terse, please.
I don’t want to have to call a class every time I modify a string or examine a browser request. Nor do I think “Object-Oriented” is the end-all and be-all of programming. It’s just one of the paradigms available, and quite a fuzzy-thinking one, at that. One thing for sure: if I have to start using camelCase on everything in PHP, I will be *gone*. Next language, please.
Yes, most of the choices made with PHP 5 were right. And now with PHP 5.3 and 6, we will finally have namespaces, which was the biggest deficiency. We will also have better character handling, and a few nice things like full lambdas and closures, the benefit of which will probably be lost to the Java crowd. First-class functions are the next thing I would like to see. But other than that, I have very little interest in giant design-by-committee “enterprise” frameworks and. If anything, PHP is already too big. It would benefit from strategic reduction of core libraries and functions, and a weeding out of default extensions.