7 August 2008

by Johan

PHP4: Good Riddance!

Today, 08/08/2008, is not only a popular day for getting married, it’s also a great day for the PHP world. PHP4 is no more, it’s expired, it’s pushing up the daisies! PHP4 is an ex-language. From now on, only PHP 5 is supported, the version that turned PHP from an advanced scipting utility into a an enterprise grade, full blown programming language.

A bit of Joomla history

When Joomla! 1.5 (called 1.1 at the time) was planned, it was decided to go for PHP4 compatibility, as PHP5 was not being adopted by ISP’s a lot. In retrospect, it would have been better to go for PHP5 right away, but of course, no-one at the time knew it would take two years before Joomla! was ready for release.

Luckily, in a flash of brilliance it was decided to make Joomla! forward compatible with PHP5. By coming up with some clever tricks here and there, adding the proper docblock comments, and having a clean naming convention, J!1.5 turned into an interim release that could bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5. The idea was that it then would be easy to refactor to PHP5-only in the next major Joomla! release.

Funnily though, when the time came to plan J!1.6, there was a general reluctance in the development working group to make the move to PHP 5.2, or even to discuss it. It took a couple of nudges from our end, to get the community to speak up and express the dire need to switch. It was great to see how the community really came together to push what it felt was important! In the end it was announced that 1.6 would be for PHP 5.2 only.

A bit of Joomlatools future

At Joomlatools, we knew early on we couldn’t realize all of our plans for Nooku using PHP4. As some people have begun to notice, Nooku is about more than just translations. A big chunk of the code is written in a way that will make it reusable for other extensions. Some of the API concepts and patterns we implemented (mixins, chain of command, inflection, …) wouldn’t have been possible with PHP4. So for us, PHP5 is the only way forward.

  • Guest

    While agreed PHP 5 is the ‘way to go’ as its seemingly opening up so many new doors, I personally do like to lag a few versions behind current with most anything thats used on a regular basis.

    Still havent made the move to PHP 5.2 and still no plans to just yet, its quite hard enough waiting for the extensions to be recoded/formatted to Joomla 1.5′s new way of working but adding another requirement on top (5.2 compliant) AT PRESENT (now) is asking a touch too much from most development teams.

    Then again as you mentioned 1.6 == 5.2, so who knows, by then maybe PHP 5.3 (currently in alpha) will have matured a little. Who knows, maybe by the time Joomla! 1.6 is out PHP 6 may be the talking point, oddly enough PHP 4.4.9 was released yesterday too.

    AND! for those of you like myself whom wondered what the hell weddings had to do with 8th August:

    “The 8th August 2008 is an auspicious date on the Chinese calendar. The Beijing Olympics will begin and at least 15-thousand couples will get married in the Olympic city a record number.”

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    Not just in China, everywhere in the world people like to get married on days like 8/8/8 (last year 7/7/7 held the record of most mariages in Belgium on a single day). Even respected PHP developers give in to the hype: http://www.travisswicegood.com/index.php/2008/08/08/today-is-the-day

    I guess it’s because that makes it easy to remember the date.

  • Guest

    Yeah, those Belgium’s sure are strange folk

  • http://www.swingcurrency.com Swing Trading

    Insightful read. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Others no doubt will like it like I did.

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