Today at 7:08am, Wade Preston Shearer said:
A major difference between the Rails world and the PHP world is that the
Rails group is moving forward fast. Even this week I looked at Planet PHP
and I see the same old discussions of PHP 4 vs PHP 5 - geez, I really
think the PHP crowd is sometimes it's own worst enemy. Even Perl seems to
be on a more progressive track. Version 5 should be old news, the planet
discussion should really be on PHP 6 or even 7.
I completely agree. I personally think that the slow adoption rate is
unacceptable. I think people are just being lazy. PHP five was released in
2004 and will no longer be supported at the end of this year. People need to
pony and and just update their code. It's really frustrating, personally.
That's easy to say if you're not the one bearing the financial costs of
doing it. (Nothing personal Wade, I see comments like that all over, and
for the most part, I agree with them, but there's another side to it.)
We've been building sites since long before PHP 5 was released, and even
longer before PHP 5 was stable. Because we do work for a variety of
clients, there are a lot of sites out there, most of them on our own
servers, that were built for PHP 4.
Here's the crux of our problem: The sites work great as is. The clients
are happy. What reason do they have to pay for an upgrade that won't get
them any improvement? What reason do we have to eat the cost of an upgrade
to their site for free? What reason is there to risk a major upgrade and
any breakage that might go along with it when the existing stuff works
fine?
The site owners don't care whether or not PHP 5 has a better object
implementation, or more useful functions, or new extensions they won't
use. If it doesn't improve their bottom line, it gives them a poor return
on investment. Until the return is higher or the cost is lower, it doesn't
make any sense for them to upgrade. We don't get anything out of upgrading
them for free, either, so it makes even less sense for us to do it without
good reason and reasonable compensation.
As it is, we've got to buy and set up and maintain at least two new
servers to be able to develop and test new sites on PHP5, and here in the
office that will mean our PHP4 server will become unaccessable from the
outside (on port 80 at least) when we make the PHP5 development server
visible to outsiders.
Even after PHP4's EOL, their sites will still continue to work just fine.
The biggest thing I think will change is that new security holes will be
found that won't get fixed after they stop patching it. That might
increase the cost/risk of staying on php4, making php5 look more
attractive.
I have been very disappointed with the lack of foresight demonstrated by
the PHP development team with PHP5. It's great that they wanted to make so
much progress, and I'm sure there are a few things that couldn't move
forward without breaking some backward compatibility. But they have made
the upgrade path so difficult and costly, and unpredictable depending on
what features and functions you used in php4, that they've been the number
one cause keeping people on php4.
</soapbox>
Anyway, that's the side of the coin we have to deal with here. I'd love to
be 100% upgraded to PHP5, but there aren't many inexpensive graceful ways
to do it when you've got a lot of sites to worry about, both old and new,
some of which will need more work soon and others that probably won't be
modified again for years.
Thanks,
Mac
--
Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/
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