PHP 4 to Reach Its End-of-Life This Year

According to the official PHP website the PHP 4 line will be discontinued. According to the PHP Team, the support for the PHP 4 will cease by the end of this year.

After that, only some critical security fixes will be available on a case-by-case basis until August 8, 2008, as the project organizers have stated. One of the main reasons for ending the support for PHP4 would be - according to the PHP developers team - to focus on the PHP 6 which is said to be ready in about a year.

"Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued. The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. ", PHP officials wrote in the announcement.

According to Andi Gutmans, co-founder and co-chief technology officer of Zend, almost 80 percent of Zend's customer base has already moved to PHP 5. "What we find is that everyone who is doing active development has already migrated," Gutmans said. Among those who have already migrated to PHP5, Gutmans points to Yahoo and Facebook, two prominent users of PHP and well known among the Internet users. It seems that Yahoo and Facebook made this movement mostly because of the better performance and reliability offered by version 5.

"The end-of-life date for PHP 4 inside Yahoo is much more aggressive than the public date," stated Rasmus Lerdorf, the original PHP author and now a Yahoo programmer.