Today is 08/08/08.  While many in the world note this as the day of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympicsin Beijing, some of us note a more important, interesting, and ceremonial date...

PHP4 is Dead. [announcement]

There are obituaries from friends, allies, and smart people such as Brandon Savage (local DCPHP'er), Stefan Priebsch, and more people than I care to link.

I came to PHP back in early 2003.  I was just coming off a major Java project and was looking for something lighter, faster to develop, and easier to deploy.  I poked around a bit and found PHP but I really didn't sink my teeth in until I found dotProject.

Everything stated in this post is the personal opinion of Keith Casey, CEO of CaseySoftware, LLC and should not be taken to represent the position of the dotProject Team or the dotProject Roadmap. With that out of the way....

With the PHP4 End of Life announced recently, the GoPHP5 group has gotten a huge boost. Many Open Source projects have been approached by the GoPHP5 group and have been asked to break compatibility with anything prior to PHP5.2. Despite the ugly website - as if I have room to talk - they have some valid points. PHP4 has been great, has managed to penetrate the web space and is huge across the board by every measure. Unfortunately, it's showing its age... and it has been for a while.

PHP5 - on the other hand - offers a variety of major improvements. The single biggest to me is its XML support. The pseudo-SAX method of XML support - startTag, endTag, etc - in PHP4 felt more like parsing a CSV. Stepping into PHP5's SimpleXML is ideally suited to manipulating the document in a useful way and the minimal size of the code is a combination that can't be beat. The second biggest benefit has been the object model. Yes, it still has some weaknesses, but the flexibility and ability to make real objects with hidden data, abstract classes, interfaces, etc has opened up a number of possibilities that didn't exist before.