PHP 4 End of Life

The PHP development team announced that support for PHP 4 will come to an end by the end of this year at which time there will not be any new releases of PHP 4.4. Here is the announcement from php.net:

[13-Jul-2007] Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

It is interesting how most of the major platforms have required migration in the recent past. Locally, I think people haven’t gotten wind of the .NET framework and all the languages it has including C# and Visual Basic.NET. This means that there is a large number of Visual Basic 6 code base that may need to be migrated or at least strategies developed to keep them running. Now PHP code needs to be migrated as well – I hope the learning institutions are taking note of this and updating the focus of their courses accordingly.