Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/27/07 09:27

Michael Fesser wrote:

> My scripts make use of many of the new OOP features in PHP 5, so they
> won't run at all on PHP 4.

Ditto.

My current big pet project is http://demiblog.org/. This is PHP 5+ only
and supports MySQL 5+ and PostgreSQL 8+. Although I do realise that earlier
versions of these packages are still quite widely used out there, this
project probably won't hit the big 1.0 for another year or two, by which
time, the hosting world will have probably moved on a lot. Supporting
older versions of PHP and the database engines will cost development time
and push back the project release date even later, by which time PHP 4
support will be even less relevant.

So although PHP 4 may still be alive right now, it's counting down the
days to his retirement when it can hand over the family business to his
son PHP 5. He's heard the happy news that his dranddaughter PHP 6 is
planning on following in their footsteps too as soon as she graduates.
Because of PHP 4's impending retirements, he's not taking on any more big
projects at work, and is letting his son take on most of the new clients.

Analogy over, it would be unwise at this point to look at supporting PHP 4
for any medium-to-large projects that are starting now or in the future.
Existing PHP 4 projects should probably keep supporting PHP 4 for a while
yet, but should certainly make an effort to support PHP 5 as well, and
should be keeping a close eye on PHP 6 developments.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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