Except that very little of that was a "battle". There were language incompatibilities between 4 and 5, but for the vast, vast, vast majority of the situations they didn't really have much of an impact (case sensitivity rules for objects have not changed). And of those that did have an impact there were few that couldn't be fixed in a very short amount of time. Additionally, the Zend Engine 2 (PHP 5) had a compatibility layer if you just _had_ to retain the old syntax which you could turn on simply by setting ze1.compatibility_layer = On, or something like that, in php.ini. Virtually all new development has been occurring on PHP 5 for several years.
Neither has anyone been "recommending" PHP 4 for several years. The only big one that I'm currently aware of is Joomla. But I just installed it on a PHP 5.3 setup without any problems. Considering that the minimum requirements for Joomla are PHP 4.3.10 (2004) and I'm running 5.3.3 (2010), it would seem like the backwards compatibility is pretty good there, actually.
Also, magic_quotes and register_globals both still exist in the most current version of PHP. They're just deprecated. Register_globals is turned off by default because it's a security risk to use them. Dittos for magic_quotes. And, today, almost nobody does. Those that do get a stern talking to.
Also, PHP 6 was not abandoned in the way you are talking about it. Blame publishers with itchy trigger fingers for that. PHP 6 was never even close to being released. As work was done, issues were found that were not anticipated and the Unicode support put on hiatus because it wasn't as important as several of the other features that were being worked on. Those features have been backported into 5.3 with work happening now on 5.4. Unicode has kind of dropped off mostly because nobody's really asking for it since you can already get most of the internationalized functionality you need with the multi-byte functionality that's been in PHP since PHP 4.0.
Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 4:31 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee
On 12/13/2010 8:22 AM, Mike Pavlak wrote:
I am not familiar with the "battle" either. Joe, can you site some references from which you are referring?
You should be familiar with this stuff, Mike, since you're selling it,
but evidently not so I'll update you.
PHP4 and PHP5 are "compatible" except where they aren't. In fact, a
couple of significant underlying pieces got completely changed. Two big
ones are objects, which in PHP4 were passed by value but in PHP5 are
passed by reference. Another problem which is minor but just painful as
hell is the fact that the classnames in PHP5 are now case sensitive,
whereas in PHP4 everything was always converted to lowercase.
There are other similar issues, enough so that lots of PHP4 code didn't
run under PHP5. Enough problems existed that for years after the
release, people were still recommending PHP4 over PHP5, and a majority
of hosting sites were still on PHP4. Years, you say? Well, yeah. PHP5
is now nearly 7 years old. And out there on the Intertubes, lots of the
example code for PHP is still PHP4, even though PHP4 was officially
discontinued as of the end of 2007.
What's up with PHP6? Well, the move to Unicode didn't go too
swimmingly. In fact, it gummed up the works enough that the PHP6 trunk
was abandoned. So PHP6 is on indefinite hold while PHP5 continues and
the PHP folks decide to come up with a new Unicode strategy. The point
is that I'll be interested to see given the slow uptake of PHP5 how many
years it takes PHP5 sites to get up to PHP6.
But really, don't take my word for it. Read up on the stuff. Read
about PHP6.
My original comment was that if Oracle decides to force a fork on Java,
they will turn it into PHP, in which backwards compatibility is not a
given (take a look at magic quotes or register globals). The loss of
stability may not be as important to a language you use primarily for
scripting, but it's a crucial issue with a true enterprise language like
Java.
Joe
midrange.com
