PHP 4 end of life announcement
[13-Jul-2007]
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. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
If you develope XML driven sites, you need PHP 5 and the evolution is so fast that you have to continually upgrade to the latest versions because of increased support for
the XML family of thechnologies.
And much more can be done in XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 than in the first versions. Using XInclude + XPointer + XPath you can embed (include) fragments and whole documents in your own documents.
XLink opens a whole new way of sematinc linking and
transclusion.
The three layers of the web, modern JavaScript (also named DOM scripting) will soon develope into "n" layers of the web with the XML family of technologies.
Last but not lest, using the improved OO features of PHP 5.* you can also write database connection classes that encapsulates the data base connection so it is possible to connect seamlessly to n different databases living on different plattforms like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase ...