Posted by John Nichel on 08/15/05 17:13

Jochem Maas wrote:
> John Nichel wrote:
<snip>
>> I'm (we're) still using PHP4. Mainly because there's been no reason
>> for us to upgrade. ie, we're not doing anything that requires PHP5
>> (and if there is no feature in PHP6 that we have to have, we won't be
>> upgrading to that either).
>
>
> my gut feeling is that php4 will remain on most large hosting systems
> for now,
> ... that php 5 is for people who enjoy the bleeding edge just a little
> and what to play/use
> newer functionality... by the time php6 comes out and has stabilized the
> majors
> will be more interested in moving direct to 6 from 4. pyschologically
> its also
> in line with the way the linux kernel is numbered - i.e. 2.x where x is
> even
> indicates a 'truely' stable/production release.
</snip>

The thing that is probably going to push us from 4 to 5 or 6 will be
MySQL. We just hired a new CEO here who is very into advancing our
backend (to describe how much of a cluster-f**k it is would take twenty
emails). One of our moves in the next year or so will be moving from
MySQL 4.0 to 4.1 or greater.

<snip>
> the biggest gain in php6 will be transparent unicode support - that is
> awesome,
> a really big plus - I'm crap at encoding et al and would really love it if
> php could handle all those funny characters without me having to think
> about it
> too much (and without having to using mb_string or iconv) - I run a
> couple of multi-lingual
> sites - right now I just pray every night that nobody asks me to
> implement japanese,
> or something, there ;-)
</snip>

Yeah, that will probably be a big gain for us in the future too. The
tiny bit of encoding we do is just merely a pain right now, but when we
branch out to selling to the rest of Europe (we just sell to the UK and
Canada outside of the US right now), the unicode support will come in
real handy.

--
John C. Nichel
ÜberGeek
KegWorks.com
716.856.9675
john@kegworks.com

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