Tuesday, 13 February 2007

PHP4 vs. PHP 5?

The Killersoft web site features an article by Clay Loveless, which discusses the popularity of PHP4 and the reasons as to why PHP 5 is not getting adopted in spite of being a newer version and three years old. Clay cites the statistics published in Nexen.net PHP Version survey which says 80 per cent of the sites running in PHP are using some kind of functions in PHP4.

Clay says that there might be a handful of compatibility issues between PHP4 and PHP 5, which even he had faced while porting code over to PHP 5 but none of them were major ones, he comments. He tries to find out why majority prefers PHP4 version. He reasons out that maybe the user’s ISP is old or the user’s systems are slow to upgrade libraries or applications.

The post attracted many comments that explain the resistance to PHP 5. One of the comment by Jan says, “We run a large and messy application on PHP4 and we just don’t have the resources to a) see if everything works in PHP 5 b) re-engineer everything. And c) we don’t really want to upgrade and see what happens. Our customers would gain exactly nothing from the transition and we’d rather spend time improving their experience and there is nothing where PHP 5 could possibly help here.” So his comment suggests a shortage of time to experiment with PHP 5.

Another problem highlighted in PHP 5 is by Jess who says that PHP 5 does not support CMS like PHP-Nuke. He comments, “I’m guessing CMS’s like PHP-Nuke factor in a lot. PHP-Nuke is popular, but doesn’t work on PHP 5. So I manage a domain that is currently stuck at PHP4 due to its use of PHP-Nuke.”

One of the comment by Yann suggests that since PHP version 4 fulfills all their needs there is no need to switch on to other versions. He says, “We just migrated from PHP 4.1.2 to PHP 4.4.4. The code is really messy and we are starting to clean things up.
Once everything is clean we will migrate to PHP. PHP4 works well and answers most of our needs. So why change? he questions.

Mikey’s comment suggest that it took PHP 5 time to get a stable release. He comments, “Well, you say PHP 5.0.0 stable release— I argue against this and say that PHP 5 has become stable with PHP 5.2.0 and not any version earlier. There was too much hassle between minor versions of PHP 5.0.x and PHP 5.1.x that lead me to many ‘WTF’ moments when upgrading from one version to another and finding out that my PHP5 code has to be changed once again to work with the new version.”

Another comment suggests that since most of the Internet Service Provider (ISP) has been upgraded in PHP4 and they hope to work with an ISP, which skips PHP 5 and jumps to PHP 6. STU says, “ISP hasn’t upgraded yet; simple as that. We could look for an ISP who offers PHP5 but there’s no compelling reason as none of our established software uses any of the new features (because it was developed on PHP4), we’ve got an established relationship with our current ISP, and I don’t fancy doing another migration. We’ll get there eventually, unless our ISP skips PHP5 and just goes straight to PHP6.”

But in the comments section there are some positive inputs for PHP 5 too. As Pбdraic Brady says, “90% of my development time is now primarily PHP 5 with a smattering of PHP4 code which is kept portable to PHP 5 and mainly because its a) open source and b) therefore only broadly useful if it works under PHP4.”