July 19th, 2007
The End of the Line for PHP4
At some point every project has to decide when legacy versions will no longer be supported. This is true of open source projects as well–as users of PHP4 are about to find out. The PHP development team announced last Friday that “support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08.”
Some people aren’t going to be too happy about this. There’s still a lot of PHP4 in use on the Web. Most of the users are, like me, probably people who saw no need to upgrade to PHP5 when things were working just fine. Large PHP users, like Yahoo! and Facebook, are working hard to port things to PHP5–or have made the switch already.
Loading ...Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
