The folks at PHP.net have announced that PHP4 development efforts will cease at the end of 2007. For an excellent discussion on the good and the bad, you can check out Matt’s blog, which was a hell of a lot more interesting than what came out of today’s expected moral outrage at Slashdot.

I have mixed feelings about this. I spent a lot of time learning PHP5 and getting used to writing proper OOP with it instead of continuing the messy style I had while using PH4. Just the exceptions were worth making the jump, they allowed us to quickly put together things we simply couldn’t get away with otherwise.

On the other hand, I run a micro hosting company, and I can tell this is going to be a huge pain in the ass for the company that provides me with my cheap-ass hosting products. The other company, the one that provides me with overpriced -yet-current hosting for both Linux and Windows, is going to be OK since their servers are much newer.

What makes this dilemma interesting is that literally EVERYONE is going to jump in and make the mess even worse. You’ll see:

1. The .net people (except myself) wondering why the hell would anyone want to use that piece of shit PHP instead of using ASP.net.
2. The PHP4 people pissed off because they are being euthanized.
3. The PHP5 people pissed off because this should be a non-issue that (in their opinion) should had been handled two years ago.
4. The Ruby and Python people wondering why the hell would anyone want to use that piece of shit PHP or ASP.net when they could leverage new paradigms by creating new synergies with either Ruby or Python.
5. CPanel-type ISPs pissed off because moving everything up to PHP5 is going to be a pain in the ass.
6. Programming book publishers that are still making money peddling books that still pitch things that may not work right when the machine only has PHP5.

And many more.

Right now the best example of the cries of outrage to come over the next 12 month are the replies to the Slashdot thread. As for this site, it is Cpanel, so I guess I’ll have to see what my hosts are going to do about it. I am positive that at my previous job I was running all 12 of our sponsored blogs (we had a dozen WordPress blogs as part of a bigger community of scientists, these were written by some of our most high-profile users) in PHP5 with no real issues.

If it becomes a problem I guess I’ll have to pack up and move this site elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Open Source, PHP, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.