[Phpwm] [Fwd: [PHPLondon-discuss] Farewell, PHP 4...]

[David Goodwin]

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Incase anyone's not aware of this....

- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PHPLondon-discuss] Farewell, PHP 4...
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:10:38 +0100
To: <phplondon-discuss at lists.phase.org>

From: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=835&tag=nl.e606
Date: July 16th, 2007
Blogger: Paul Mah
Category: News, Programming
Tags: PHP, Paul Mah

The end appears to be in sight for the beloved version 4 of PHP, the
open-sourced scripting language that allows seasoned programmers and
beginners alike to quickly and easily write code for the World Wide Web.

According to the terse announcement on the main PHP Web site:

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.

The announcement came on the third anniversary since PHP 5 was launched.
Project programmers says that they want to devote their finite resources
on the upcoming PHP 6 instead.

According to Rasmus Lerdorf, the original PHP author and now a Yahoo
programmer:

"Ending PHP 4 support is driven by practical necessity. We are an
open-source project with limited resources. With PHP 6 on the way, we
don't have the resources to support three different versions of PHP at
the same time."

Detractors to the decision have less kind words to say. According to
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of the WordPress blogging software and site,
which uses PHP:

"PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most
estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low tens."

"Now the PHP core team seems to have decided that the boost their
failing product needs is to kill off their successful one instead of
asking the hard questions: What was it that made PHP 4 so
successful?.Why wasn't PHP 5 compelling to that same audience? Are the
things we're doing in PHP 6 crucial to our core audience or simply
'good' language problems to solve?"



- ----

David.

- --
David Goodwin

[ david at codepoets dot co dot uk ]
[ http://www.codepoets.co.uk       ]
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