PHP4 EoL - How will Users React?

Infoworld wonders how the response will be to the, in my view, much overdue announcement that PHP 4 will be retired. In a way open source communities are no different from commercial corporations, they need to focus on what has impact and minimize deploying resources to activities that make less of a difference. We will look back upon this decision as one that helped us maintain the health of the PHP ecosystem.

In Zend’s customer base we have seen the switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happen about a year ago. Commercial use of PHP is based on PHP 5 in large majority of cases we see nowadays. Now that the leading open source projects like Drupal and PHPMyAdmin are switching, there really is not much reason left to continue to support PHP 4. There are also very many hosting companies available who can provide hosted servers that run PHP 5.

Companies looking to justify the migration cost should consider the improved performance characteristics and the improved security of PHP 5 among others.

Zend has made PHP 5 (in fact PHP 5.2 or better) a requirement for its recently released Zend Framework, which I think will be seen as the killer application for PHP 5. PHP 5 plus Zend Framework is the perfect platform to base your next generation of modern web applications on.

Zend is already helping many companies that are switching from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and will continue doing so in the coming year.

(PS 7/16/2007: News.com ran a story on the announcement. It is pretty balanced, but it is clear that the debate will not go away any day soon.)