End Of Support For PHP 4
19th July 2007
It has been announced on the PHP website that support for PHP 4 will stop at the end of this year.
The PHP development team hereby announces 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. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
It is normal for support for old technologies and products to end, so why is this such a big deal?
It has been three years since PHP 5, the successor to PHP 4 was launched, yet so many web applications are still using PHP 4. PHP 4 has been enormously popular choice as a web scripting language, part of its popularity was due to its easy implementation and use. However, some of the techniques that make PHP 4 easy to use can also be security risks. One of the changes that PHP 5 made was to close these risks meaning that some (as it turned out many) PHP 4 scripts would need slight re-coding to work with the new PHP 5 engine.
Because of the compatibility issues, which should only really effect badly written scripts, hosting providers still kept PHP 4 as default so their would be effected customers would not have a broken web site or application. Many hosting providers still today have PHP 4 as default and some offer the option of PHP 5 on selected domains.
As PHP 4 was almost certainly the most used version, web applications such as Joomla kept using PHP 4 as their code base as it was almost certain everyone with a PHP enabled web server could install their product. Even the yet to be released Joomla 1.5 still maintains a PHP 4 code base for compatibility with all servers. Considering this its hardly surprising PHP 5 hasn't had the best take-up.
This is a big deal as the PHP team are saying that there will be no more PHP 4 by the end of this year and all PHP 4 users with incompatible scripts will have to start making the necessary changes or keep an unsupported platform.
This move by the PHP team is a necessary step to push users towards their newer PHP 5 and with PHP 6 in development the resources do not exist to carry on supporting PHP 4 any further.