Go PHP 5 – TODAY

Today is the day that the GoPHP5.org community ‘flips the switch’ on PHP 5 development and ends all active
ongoing development in PHP 4. I wrote about the PHP 5 org effort over on the main site last week in a story that I personally was very excited to write, after all I cut my teeth on PHP 4 years ago building websites with it when there really were no other reasonable alternatives.

The general idea behind GoPHP5.org makes a whole lot of sense too – why would anyone choose to go through the effort of migrating to PHP 5 when they still can use PHP 4 since their open source project of choice still supports PHP 4?

There are alot of benefits to moving to PHP 5, but the reality is that most developers are just trying to do their job and make a living.  The shift by the key open source projects that make up GoPHP5.org hopefully will provide some impetus for people to move.

Then again it has been years since Apache 2.x was released and there are still a good number of Apache 1.3x HTTP Web Server users out there. With Apache 2.x there wasn’t necessarily a GoApache2 effort  but in recent years the major Linux distributions have simply chosen to package Apache 2.x by default as opposed to Apache 1.3x. I suppose that over time as older servers (with older Linux versions) die off, so too will Apache 1.3x. I suspect the same scenario will play out over time with PHP 4.x as well.