PHP 4's end of life

[Eidolon]

Earlier in the month the following was announced in regards to PHP4...

PHP 4 end of life announcement
[13-Jul-2007]

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

...I've no idea if anyone still uses PHP4 though I imagine this will mean other hosts upgrading PHP if they wish to remain secure. Interesting to hear news of PHP6 in development, as I haven't heard that much about it previously.
http://php.net/

[Ben]

PHP4 is still used on the majority of Web hosts still. Although nothing against PHP, but I have recently switched to using ASP, and learning ASP instead, and its particularly easier to learn. I have heard of PHP6 as well, but nothing more than that.

[DPS Computing]

I feel it is a good idea - If support was never discontinued then some people would always stall on upgrading and that would be unfair on the PHP development team to keep so many versions working seemlessly . I expect a lot of PHP upgrading now!

[Eidolon]

It's also a headache for support multiple version of a software, particularly if there are major differences in how parts of the versions work. Whilst it's often worth providing security updates for older versions if only for good Page Ranking, from a development point you want to be focusing on your current and upcoming releases.

[DPS Computing]

Originally Posted by Eidolon

It's also a headache for support multiple version of a software, particularly if there are major differences in how parts of the versions work. Whilst it's often worth providing security updates for older versions if only for good Page Ranking, from a development point you want to be focusing on your current and upcoming releases.

Yes, otherwise it normally leads to substandard new releases being made which does nothing for your popularity, your product or your users!

[eUKhost.com]

as of now there's nothing wrong with php4. I've not seen any sort of security breach in php4 but its good to upgrade to php5 ASAP as php5 has got many good features that php4 hasn't got.

I'll send this information to all our customers as that will give them sufficient time to upgrade their code.

[flesso]

Plesk the control panel is written in PHP3 - still! I don't know whether it genuinely is written in PHP3, or whether it's a HTTP handler.

[eUK-Martin]

Plesk uses PHP5 with OOPS. The php3 extension is just a http handler that ultimately uses PHP5.

[flesso]

Originally Posted by eUK-Martin

Plesk uses PHP5 with OOPS. The php3 extension is just a http handler that ultimately uses PHP5.

What do you mean by 'OOPS'?

[swexpert]

Originally Posted by flesso

What do you mean by 'OOPS'?

Object Oriented Programming System. Somehting using Classes and Objects.


-IJ

[eUK-Martin]

Originally Posted by swexpert

Object Oriented Programming System. Somehting using Classes and Objects.

That was on target..

OOPS is a second level scripting and much complicate.

[DPS Computing]

Good idea about the email to inform everyone Mark.

I was going to say that I doubt Plesk is written in PHP3 as I am sure it needs certain features of PHP5 to work and do what it does!