Matt Barnicle wrote:
Hi,
we were just pondering how many of you still rely on PHP4 support since we'd make life easier and drop it on devel-vnext completely. Same goes for our DB logic, MDB2 is very mature currently - should we rely on it exclusively?
Thoughts? Comments? Feedback?
I personally think it's a good idea to move forward and use PHP5. Really, the main reason PHP5 apps aren't being built is just because of that one thing that people are mentioning, their host doesn't have it installed. But if they had an incentive to upgrade, they would.
I partly agree with you here, that's what I was talking about when I said that PHP5 doesn't have the "killer-apps" that make me upgrade. Currently I don't care for PHP5. Why should I? And until some brave projects drop PHP4 support and are really interesting for me I won't make the switch. Does this stop progress? No idea, I don't care for new versions of PHP and wouldn't know the difference, probably. As long as something presents me a nice webmail interface I cannot guess if it runs on perl, ruby, php or java (we ignore 'standard' file extensions for now). It's not that I'm not a technical person. In fact I even earn my money as a software developer (not web development though), but I care for PHP4 or 5 under RCs hood as much as for the origin of my cars parts. As long as it works its fine for me. No need to change anything.
I personally think this mentality is hindering progress, but I also respect others' viewpoints on the matter. The move to apache2 has been compared, and I think that's another example where the move should be done. It has support for threading, so when a new request comes in, an entire server process doesn't have to be forked! What a tremendous potential resource savings if all hosts were to just switch... That's just one example, there are lots more..
This is something that I wouldn't want to sign. With threading come problems (a looong time several PHP extensions weren't even threadsafe) and if you look at the other (completely OT, yes) webserver related posts above in this thread you'll notice that quite some people (me included) switched away from apache to for example lighttpd. Which - incidently - is a single process. Yes, only one. That doesn't say that it's not fast. The contrary is quite true. I don't want to troll here, but these conclusions of yours are a little bit off..
Regards, Ben