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Posted by John Murtari on 09/19/07 16:23
Herb <herb_k@mail.com> writes:
> Why do so many hosting services only offer PHP4? That's even true for
> Yahoo.
>
Being at a hosting provider I can give you the exact
reasons. There are two huge ones:
1) Backward compatability.
2) Ability to run PHP 4 & PHP 5 at the same time.
#2 is probably the biggest show stopper on php 5 adoption
by providers. When the change occured from php 3 -> php 4, it
was possible to configure Apache servers to run both as modules
and to setup users so that files ending in .php or .php3 would
see the 'old' php3 environment. Folks wanting ot use the new stuff
could use the .php4 extension - OR - buy changing some .htaccess
mappings have all their files go to php4.
Later on after a period of warnings we gradually weaned
the folks from php 3 -> php 4 and eventually stopped all 3 support.
The GREAT thing was, if a user had a real problem on 4, they could
still use 3 on their own stuff while everybody else went to 5.
When php 5 came out it appears the developers did NOT put
a priority on being able to run both as modules at the same time.
There are some 'rube goldberg' setups where you can use proxies
or setup as a cgi -- but nothing transparent to the thousands of
web sites already in existence using php 4 just fine.
We would love to use php 5 -- but we can't break sites
on the old stuff with people who don't know how to maintain their
code and their is no 'easy' transition path.
--
John
___________________________________________________________________
John Murtari Software Workshop Inc.
jmurtari@following domain 315.635-1968(x-211) "TheBook.Com" (TM)
http://thebook.com/
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