Yes, today is the release of PHP 4.4.9, marking the death of PHP 4. No more work will be done to PHP 4. 99% of the time I’m using PHP 5 now anyway, so it won’t make a huge difference in my life. But then again, will it make a huge difference in anyone’s life? Some web hosts are migrating to PHP5, but I believe a vast quantity of web hosts still use PHP4, and I don’t see that changing in a hurry. What about those still using code that isn’t PHP5-compatible. Thankfully, most PHP4 code can work straight off in PHP5, but there’s still the risk. The way I see it, every host should’ve started migrating to PHP5 long ago, with the option to use PHP4 or 5 (such as 1and1.co.uk, who default to PHP4, but have the option to use PHP5).
Where do we go from here? Well I think a short word or two about PHP4 might be in order. I’m not upset or anything, it’s just a legacy passing really - I got into PHP when it was version 3, which -lets be fair- was a bit of a hack, but it was getting there. PHP4 was polished, oiled and much slicker, and ironed out most of those annoyances, and gave the language more structure. The way I see it now, it was a big building block for PHP5 - which now features proper Object Orientation and a multitude of other bits. PHP6 I see as a yet more refined version of this, with legacy bits removed. Web development is a fast-moving world, and you just have to keep up really…
So - migrating to PHP4 to 5? Well for simple websites, it should be a case of sticking it up there and it should mostly work. Unfortunately for those huge frameworks, that could take a while as there could be in the region of thousands of problems. Still - eventually it’ll have to be done I think, so what better time than now?
PHP4 is dead… Long live PHP5!
