PHP 4 to be discontinued from December

July 13th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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PHP

Although this has been discussed for a while on the PHP internals list it has now been made public that PHP 4 will not have any further releases from december. Here is the annoucement from the PHP.NET website.

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.

So what effect will this have on the PHP community? Questions that will now be asked.

  • How will web hosting services react? So many still only have PHP 4 support what will the cost implications be for them?
  • Will all the current popular PHP projects (Cake,Drupal,wordPress) move over to only supporting PHP 5?
  • Will new PHP projects all automatically be started as PHP 5, or will they still see the massive PHP 4 install base and support 4 as well? (this is exactly what they do not want.)
  • Will someone else branch off the PHP 4 codebase and continue to develop it?

Answers on a postcard… or in the comments :)

Overall I think this is a great step forward for PHP and I hope this will mean much higher adoption for PHP 5.

There Are 10 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by riffraff on 13 July 2007:

    I read something like “if you still use php4 you deserve problems” once..
    I would exclude the fork part, if someone is a developer good enough to manage a php4 fork by her/himself s/he wouldn’t be using it by this time, I believe.

  2. Comment by Chris on 13 July 2007:

    Take a look at: gophp5.org/. The web community is behind this as well. Drupal is on that list, as well as Typo3, PhpMyAdmin, and several others. (Including Gallery, the project I work on).

    It’s my guess that all the current popular PHP projects will go that way and web hosts will have to to keep their customers!

  3. Pingback by PHP 4 is dead | weboholism on 13 July 2007:

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  4. Comment by Chris on 13 July 2007:

    It’s about time. Too bad MySQL won’t do the same thing and force all the webhosts to move to MySQL 5 and stop letting 4.0.x linger around for eternity.

  5. Comment by Md Emran Hasan on 14 July 2007:

    The implication on the web hosting companies will be huge, supposedly many hosting companies do not have enough resource to work this out. And how they’re gonna convince their existing clients who has a business application running based on PHP 4 ? It will be damn tough i guess.

    Anyways, the move to the PHP5 is inevitable (if not done yet by some folks), whether its today of 6 months down the road. You want to taste the sweetness of strong features, you don’t have any choice buddy.

  6. Comment by tedivm on 15 July 2007:

    I own a webhosting company and work as a contractor at a consortium that has hundreds of business clients, and the big issue we’re facing is the fact that our clients don’t want to pay for their applications to be updated.

    All of our new servers come with PHP5, and I prefer the language for lots of reasons (which should be pretty obvious), but the big issue is simply that I can’t update all of their stuff for free, and most clients aren’t willing to pay for it. I’m glad they gave a time frame and that will help, but I seriously hope PHP 6 has some thought put into backwards compatibility.

  7. Comment by Shane on 20 July 2007:

    ….. but the big issue is simply that I can’t update all of their stuff for free, and most clients aren’t willing to pay for it.

    I am a PHP developer and run a hosting server and this is definitely the real issue, many hosting clients hired PHP programmers to create custom code. As far as the clients are concerned their website works just fine, and they paid once, they don’t want to pay someone to update the code to be compatible with PHP5.

    So the difficulty lies in explaining to non programming / non technical clients why the upgrade is necessary. I for one am glad PHP finally publicly announced the end of PHP4. Now when clients ask, I have a defined reason (PHP4 is dieing) and I point them to PHP.net to see for themselves.

    In all honesty there seem to be only a few incompatibilities from PHP4 to PHP5, most common that I’ve seen so far is using short tags (easy enough to search for and fix) which technically could be enabled again (though it obviously makes sense to keep them disabled with the

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  9. Comment by Edward W on 1 November 2007:

    I still use PHP4 with zero issues.

    I may be considered a dinosaur still coding function-based scripts, but I can attest that my code runs well, runs clean and runs much faster than object oriented PHP5 equivalents. Even better, it is readable code!

    I admit, I have not dared to try PHP5 since 2 years ago when I made a simple upgrade on one of my high traffic (80M views per month) sites and the servers came down in flames.

    Nearly double the RAM usage per thread == double the RAM/Server requirements.
    What is the upside of this?

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