Nothing has instant uptake. Java 6 4 years old and has 70%, Java 5 (EOLed) at 8% or so. Those are the desktop numbers I could find. I could not find numbers for the server side. The best comparison would be Java 5 to PHP 4 since both were EOLed within a few months of each other. Java 5 lives on! I never said that PHP 5 had an instant uptake, nor did I say it happened quickly. The _initial_ uptake was slow. That was the period between 2006 and 2008. A lot of the true migrations started after 5.2 was released in 2007.
The website that you noted was not a site in support of PHP 4. Did you read the comments on stopphp5.org? And he's a squatter, owning about a hundred other domain names. And if you look at the HTTP headers you will see that it was a site done by someone who thought that video games peaked with Pong.
Concerning conferences, like I said, look at the PHP conferences. They are the ones who know the market best. I would be interested in seeing the attendance of the migration session at that conference. Just because a conference has a talk does not mean it's of interest to people. I have several stories of this but the one that sticks in my mind is a conference where 80% of the attendees were .NET developers, 50% of the sessions were Ruby sessions and the only guy to mention PHP was the Microsoft guy.
And concerning backwards compatibility (which I addressed earlier), I installed Joomla on my PHP 5.3 server with no problems. Joomla's minimum requirement is PHP 4.3.10, which was released in 2004. The PHP 5 object model will not run on PHP 4, yes. However, the PHP 4 objects will run in a PHP 5 engine and most code written for PHP 4 will run with very little modification on PHP 5. Plus, there is a compatibility layer (which I think got removed for 5.3, or will be in the near future) where objects act as though it were PHP 4.
Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 4:26 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] PHP Books at Sitepoint
On 12/15/2010 3:54 PM, Kevin Schroeder wrote:
Yes, I know of the migration service. I built it. I can't share data on deliveries of that service (or traffic to that page... I think you just caused a bump :-) ), but the data leans heavily in my favor.
Just because there are companies and sessions at conferences for a certain topic does not mean that they are indicative of the market at large. Look at ZendCon or TEK if you want to get an accurate representation of what is current in the PHP market. Migration from 4 to 5 hasn't been on the radar for several years at the PHP conferences. Same thing as with migration services. Perhaps there are companies doing migrations and making impressions off of conference sessions talking about migration, but it sure ain't us nor any of the people I've talked to today.
That's cool. But the fact that those services still exist today and
that they were giving sessions quite recently at major conferences
doesn't jive with your assertion that virtually all conversion was done
several years ago. I'm pretty deeply involved with one of the largest
IBM i conferences, and I know it's not normal for conference planners to
include sessions on dead topics just for the heck of it. There are no
websites devoted to Java 1.2 (actually, I think Java 1.3 would be a
better comparison, since it was released at the same time as PHP4), no
consulting companies offering conversion services, no conference
sessions for working with or converting Java 1.2. Meanwhile, PHP4 still
lives, even after a stake was driven into its heart in 2008. In that
sense, PHP is more like RPG than Java! :)
My point was only that PHP5 was not an instant uptake, and that it was
in fact a long uptake, and that there are still people moving off of it
today. That's at least partly because there were some distinct
backwards compatibility issues - issues that are nowhere near as
prevalent in the Java world.
Joe
midrange.com
