Can you hear them? Neither can I.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
The crickets are killing me!
PHP 4.4.8, the last release from the 4.x branch, was released on January 3rd. According to the latest statistics released by Nexen, roughly 70% of the PHP user base should be screaming bloody murder, running around like decapitated chicken (although, technically speaking, other parts of their body have been cut off) and politely pointing out that the fact that nearly three quarters of the developer population is essentially being hung out to dry.
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8 comments:
This is most likely because the 70% on PHP4 are the 70% who aren't serious developers. And for the hosting companies, the end of PHP4 had to come sometime, so they can't complain too loudly about it. They're busy figuring out just how they're going to do this, if they hadn't already.
It's really a shame that PHP5 didn't include any Unicode support. PHP6 is just dooming us all to reliving this vicious circle again.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to steer my professional career towards Python. Not only don't I like the PHP language as a whole, but its release process leaves quite a bit to be desired, too. Witness 5.2.0: "O HAI, WE HAVE UR 5.2. FUK 5.1 ITZ INSEKURE!!! BTW 5.2 IS FINALLY STABLE - SUCKR! OK, WE TEST NEW MEMRY MANIJER NOW, PLZ USE."
I used to be one of those early adopters (started to work on PHP5 beta1 on a soone to be released product) over time i understood that business care more about risk management then features.
It not up to the programmer to decide what version of PHP the software should run on, it's up to the sysadmin & managers.
Programmers just have to make it work ;)
I beleive this pretty mutch sums it up.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "base of the pyramid" of PHP 4 users aren't even aware that PHP 4 has reached end-of-life. They are probably not even aware that they're using PHP at all.
Most organizations don't upgrade if their infrastructure loses support. They don't even upgrade when security advisories are released. They upgrade only when there is a compelling feature missing, or if a catastrophic bug forces them to upgrade.
So to make people upgrade, we must invent a new type of application that runs only on PHP 5 or greater. Something as revolutionary and influential as wikis or blogs. Easier said than done!
Bill, something like gophp5.org?
As for upgrading, we will have to go down this path at work, and its a horrible one. We have alot of old code, that we have hardly time for to upgrade. I'd rather move to php6 now, as we need unicode more and more in our applications (we're an international organisation), and skip the whole php5 upgrade.
I do agree that php upgrades need more sanity, but I don't know enough of the process behind to come up with solutions. I guess the whole start of php, coming from a very simple target of only adding tiny functionality to homepages, and everyone adding functions to it without a clear vision didn't help.
What is needed is cleaning up php, maybe we need a php core which has new sane functions, where you can lead modules for backward compatibility if you cannot port your code quickly enough.
I'd also be not too afraid to trade more logical functionnames or parameters or even behavior for breaking backwards compatibility in php6, I hate having to memorize all the different kind of orders in which we pass parameters to functions e.g....
PHP4 still works and there is nothing stopping anyone from using it.
You cannot expect an open source project to continue supporting out dated software forever. Not even the big guys do that. You pay hundreds or thousands of dollars on Windows OS and MS stops supporting it completely after around 5 years, XP SP1 isn't even supported anymore. You pay good money and get shafted quicker in the corporate world than the FOSS world.
We the limited resources a FOSS project has I praise PHP for going it this long.
Being the publisher of PHP|arch I would think you know that better than anyone. But since you really didn't go into the reasoning you have for your dismay it is hard to understand why you are against it.
@alan (and the others): I have nothing against PHP 4 being obsoleted—my only concern is with the fact that the community at large seems to be oblivious to this fact, and I am afraid that security issues exposed after the end-of-life date are going to cause a wave of problems for those who don't upgrade (and, by means of negative publicity, to the rest of us who are trying to evangelize the language).
"...I am afraid that security issues exposed after the end-of-life date..."
I am curious why this is such a big issue for you. This is an unfortunate effect in all software.
I think that if anything I would be more concerned with the fact that the report you listed shows that only 45% of the 70% using PHP4 are using 4.4x. That means that 25% of all PHP installations are extremely security ridden. That seems to be a much bigger risk than 4.48 being left out (which it won't be completely left out until 08/08/08).
And if they people won't upgrade from 4.3 to 4.4, then I don't think they should be included in the decision of whether we should support PHP4. Because even if we did it obviously would not matter.
I think/suspect that a lot of the companies we're talking about here have only recently started their migration plans. And since business in the PHP world is currently quite busy, I think a lot of these companies don't give the migration the attention they should be giving. It is my experience with one of my previous employers that they knew about it, but simply gave it a very low priority (the EOL is still far away!) ... as far as I know, this company still isn't upgraded fully. OK, for big applications, they now use a PHP5 framework, however most of their products are websites with a popular CMS that runs fine on PHP4 as well. I have the vague idea that they won't be on PHP5 when 8/8/8 hits them in the face either. But in those cases, it's the choice of the company (manager(s) usually) to give other things priority. So it's really nothing to worry about for "us" outsiders. It's of their own choosing.
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