[UPHPU] PHP 4 EOL Announcement

[Walt Haas]

On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 02:00 -0600, jtaber wrote:
> Velda Christensen wrote:
> > Amen to that.  I've had to fix many a site that had upgraded to 5, and 
> > I wouldn't dare just update a server to 5 randomly.  We're setting up 
> > all new servers as 5, and letting our php4 users move to php 5 servers 
> > when they're ready.
> >
> We only started using PHP after vers 5 came out.  You mean a version 
> change didn't deprecate old functions rather than break them?  Isn't PHP 
> open sourced?   I'm surprised the community allowed that to happen or 
> that a fork didn't happen.   With the built in testing, Rails shows 
> functions being deprecated in the next major version.   Think this is 
> also a selling point to clients why a test suite is so important as part 
> of a project.

The change between 4 and 5 was bigger than deprecating functions.  PHP 4
allowed 

   $this = classname;

to change the definition of an object on the fly.  That doesn't work at
all in PHP 5.  So there was a fundamental change to the class model
between 4 and 5.  PHP 4 objects are more like objects in JavaScript in
that you can rearrange them on the fly, whereas PHP 5 objects are more
like those in C++ and Java.

Consider for example Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com) which is a
popular photo sharing app.  Gallery 1 wouldn't run at all on PHP 5 until
parts of it were rewritten to use the newer class model.

So there was an effective fork in PHP created by large numbers of sites
staying on PHP 4.

-- Walt