Posted by Greg Donald on 12/20/05 00:31

On 12/19/05, PHPDiscuss - PHP Newsgroups and mailing lists
<admin@toucanmultimedia.com> wrote:
> As a developer, I would love to use PHP 5+ for applications but I am
> afraid to do so because 90% of web hosting companies do not offer it. The
> biggest reason that that they do not offer it is because there is little
> demand for it. The reason why there is little demand for it is that
> developers do not use it because webhosts do not support it. A classic
> catch 22 situation!

I fail to see what this has to do with a 1961 novel. Do you mean
chicken-egg perhaps? There's nothing keeping _you_ from using one of
those 10% who are supporting PHP5. If you aren't part of the
solution..

> I think that continuing to offer prominent download links for PHP 4
> versions on the same page as download links for php 5 on the php.net and
> Zend sites is a major contributor to this problem.

Doubtful. I gotta think most people who use PHP do not install it
themselves. Those who do install it themselves are probably smart
enough to find the older versions no matter where you hide them on the
site.

> To get PHP 5 accepted,
> links to download earlier versions should be hidden away in some obsure
> area.

PHP4 does what most people need it to do. No reason to upgrade. You
can't really fix that since there's nothing broken.

What is in PHP5 that you _need_ exactly? If it's OO then there are
much, much better places to get your OO fix. Not to mention I have
never once had a client ask for PHP specifically, much less PHP5. I
use PHP 5 because I want to stay current with my skills, not because I
need language functionality that's missing in PHP4. Same with Apache
2, PostgreSQL 8, and MySQL 5.


--
Greg Donald
Zend Certified Engineer
MySQL Core Certification
http://destiney.com/

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