SQLFusion blogs

The PHP community is pushing everybody to move to PHP5.
PHP4 support will stop at the end 2007 in a cry to increase PHP5 adoption.
The GoPHP5.org was recently started to help.
On a language point of view it make no sens to keep using PHP4 today. PHP 5 and specially 5.2 is much better.

Now the reality is that 80% of the PHP web sites are running php4.

July 2007 stats from Nexen

Blame the Web Host ?
Blame the php developers ?
Well its a simple chicken / egg situation: WebHost offer PHP4 because more applications are available in PHP4, developer create PHP4 applications because they want their customer to run their application on regular web hosting accounts.

When I was a developer I started with PHP/FI and I have some of my customer that are still running PHP3 and PHP4 sites or applications.
The applications runs great and maintenance cost are low.
Its hard to justify the cost to upgrade to PHP5 without creating animosity against PHP and its community.

Its like a proprietary vendor forcing you to upgrade by threatening an end of life of your current product.

My message to the PHP core developer team:
You are doing an amazing job with PHP the language is strong, rich, powerful, fast and has evolved in the right direction.
PHP developers loves PHP5 (at least the one I know) its great and so much better than PHP4.
But a couple of things would make a huge difference in new versions adoption.

• Stop creating backward incompatibility: Like removing the register global option in PHP6, you have all the good reason to do it, but just don't. For PHP6 adoption its key that PHP5 code run without errors out of the box on PHP6. (notice are fine). Add environment or configuration flag/variables to make PHP5 code to run on PHP6.
• Incentive for Web Host: Improved apache module shared hosting security with better jail function like open_base_dir or a suexec compatibility, dynamic block of PHP function from Virtual hosts..... Maximum security without hurting performances. Even if it sounds more like an Apache problem, Web Host don't care. If you give them a reason that make sens to them: security improvement, increase performance, less customer support requests (upward incompatibility) you will get a better adoptions rate.

Good luck, this is just my 2c after working more than 10 years with PHP and over 400 customers running PHP applications.