A week or so ago, I posed a question on Twitter:
If you were going to build a PHP application for use by others, would you even bother making it PHP4 compatible any more?
Responses were - with one exception - unanimous, with most people citing hosting as a key reason. Rachel Andrew, edgeofmyseat:
PHP5 all the way … more apps that require PHP5 means more people asking for PHP5 on shared hosting.
Jon Gibbins agreed:
Not worth the effort now I think. I suspect many hosting services to be upgrading now that PHP 4 is end of life.
Encourage people to look forward not back.
CodeIgniter and PHP5
While there are a fair few PHP frameworks that only run on PHP5, CodeIgniter is not one of them - in fact, the only minor benefit one can obtain from using PHP5 is that it allows you to chain methods together when using its Active Record class:
$result = $this->db->select('id, name')->from('mytable')->where('name', 'Bob')->get();
So no real benefit to be gained in that respect. What PHP5 does offer, though, is many new functions, a completely new object model, and various other cool things.
At the moment I’m leaning heavily in favour of going with PHP5 - as someone else noted, it’s going to be much easier to port code from PHP5 to PHP6, than from 4 to 6 - but I’m still open to persuasion if anyone thinks differently.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:28 pm
For building an application, I’d strongly favour PHP5 only if you get to control the hosting (ie: you aren’t selling a distributed app). For framework development though, I think its too early for CI and Cake to abandon PHP4. Yes we hate it, yes it sucks, but it still represents 60% of the PHP market available at this time - since the PHP end of life announcement [em]a year ago[/em] that has dropped 15%. If we assume that decline will hold (I doubt it will, but let’s pretend) then I think we’ll be ready to abandon PHP4 in about 2 more years.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
My heart says goes with PHP5 but my (business) brain says go with PHP4.
The trouble is that you’re limiting your potential market by rejecting PHP4 - don’t get me wrong I’ve just released a web app that is PHP5 only and plan another soon but deep down I know it’s a small mistake to only support PH5.
Sadly a lot of web hosts only support PHP4 at all or PHP5 in a strange way - e.g. with 1and1 (a huge hosting supplier) you have to add a line to your .htaccess file that is beyond the scope of most small time website owners (e.g. 1and1’s customer base)
August 15th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Chris Shiflett has an interesting post about PHP 4 and its end of life:
http://shiflett.org/blog/2008/aug/end-of-life-for-php-4