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PHP has officially ended development of PHP 4 with the final release of 4.4.9 on August 7, 2008 nearly a year after the ideal was first floated by Derick Rethans.  Chris Schiflett does a nice job of pulling a few choice quotes out of the conversation that lead up to its demise.

“I am trying to gauge what people feel about dropping support for PHP 4 at the end of this year.”
Derick Rethans on the PHP Internals List (2007-07-06)

That is a phenomenally difficult question.  I’m glad to see the team decided to err on the side of moving forward giving the developers the ability to completely emerge their time and efforts in PHP 5/6.  They got it right.

Apache went through this very same debate with httpd 1.3, and although it may be easier for those entrenched in 4.4, I have to imagine that they are not the developers they have in mind as PHP pushs toward unicode support, a more refined OO model and other advances in 5/6.  I tend to doubt that those still developing in 4.4 routinely upgrade minor revisions, let alone the security patches.

In full disclosure, I too was closed minded about migrating to PHP 5 until a friend (who I wish would develop his blog for further PHP exploration) took the time to preach the gospel.

PHP has made a difficult decision in that it has recognized that it cannot be all things to all people.  To do so would slow development to a more commericial timeline.  Focus on the team behind the advancements, and the user base will come along (me included)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 7:44 am and is filed under Development, Security, Technology, Web / Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.