The case for PHP 5
December 22nd, 2007
I’ll admit it. Like many other hosting companies, we’ve been remiss in upgrading to PHP 5 on our shared hosting servers. Apparently, we’re in good company. Nexen Services queried approximately 2 million servers and found the following (as of November 2007):
There may be some valid reasons for sticking with PHP 4, especially in highly controlled environments (think Yahoo), or in redistributable software, where you need to be able to reach the largest installed base without requiring architecture changes. However, as a web host to customers in non-controlled environments, and a developer who develops primarily within our own hosting environment, we have the luxury of being a cautious leader.
Also, I think that part of the reluctance to switch to PHP-5 is a fear of the new coding styles that it strongly encourages. The days of <?php include(’header.inc’) ?> are coming to an end, and are being replaced with MVC-esque coding structures. The general PHP community is taking time to come to terms with this.
It’s funny how realization of the need for change often comes out of a personal inconvenience. Last week I set out to write a substantial application to use on our hosting servers, developing it on my personal development box. I uploaded the code expectantly, and found that nothing worked. I had forgotten that PHP 4 lacks many of the magic object methods I’ve grown accustomed to using (__get, and __set, and __construct primarily).
I can either spend a day refactoring my code to work on PHP 4 (and make it much less elegant in the process) or I can take the plunge and get the ball rolling to upgrade all of our boxes to PHP 5. I’m going with the latter option. Implementation details to follow.
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