rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Just about three months after Rasmus Lerdorf challenged the Drupal community to drop PHP 4 in favor of PHP 5 exclusively, the countdown has started:

PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4's shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can't drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0.

As I write this, that means 213 days from now.

but what is rather shocking is how many "big" hosting companies do not even offer PHP5 at all.

Since my company deals almost exclusively with dedicated servers, where the entire configuration is pretty much up to us, this push is not a direct issue. However, not everyone is building a big site requiring such resources, and it's rather shocking is how many "big" hosting companies do not even offer PHP5 at all.

The website lists some hosts that have stated their intention to offer PHP 5.2 or better in their offerings by then. It is obviously an incomplete list, but I hope more companies will sign on in public support of this effort. (That means those of you reading this should forward that link to your own hosting company.)

Drupal, and just about any other PHP-powered application, will benefit greatly from being free to drop support for PHP4.

Kudos go to those behind this effort:

• Robert Douglass
• Larry Garfield
• Marc Delisle
• Ken Rickard
• Jonah Braun
• Michael Keck
• Dries Buytaert

About the author

Laura Scott is a web designer and developer.