Posted by Carl Vondrick on 12/17/34 11:54

axlq wrote:
> PHP 5 is also vastly under-deployed. If your job is to develop
> web sites to be hosted on an ISPs server, it is far better to use
> PHP 4, because the features of PHP 5 are almost guaranteed to be
> UNavailable on most servers, unless you have your own server on a
> colocation service.

ISP hosting? Never! :-)

The future is in PHP5. If you are going to invest time in learning, you
would hope that you could use it later down the line! There are plenty
of hosts out there that provide PHP5 and decided that not using a
2-year-old-almost-3-year-old language is simply a bad idea. I'm
currently very happy with NetworkRedux (http://www.networkredux.com/).
The issue with PHP not be stable doesn't make sense, and it's obvious
that the PHP developers aren't going to make PHP5 more stable (probably
because it's already stable?).

I agree, though, if you aren't interested in learning the language and
just want to implement something, PHP4 is the quick solution.

The key differences with PHP 4 and PHP 5 are probably things that won't
concern a new comer (real OOP, PDO, Exceptions, SPL) for a while. But,
it still would probably be wise to invest in a PHP5 book, because the
basic chapters would still apply to 4.

Carl

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