On PHP
PHP.net has announced that they will stop development of PHP4 at the end of this year, and end security updates on 2008-08. (In 2007, their site still doesn't have obvious permalinks. They do have a RSS 1.0 feed though, remember those?) — PHP 4.0 was release in May of 2000 …
Context & Ripple Effects
PHP.net's July 13 announcement sets a hard clock on a seven-year-old platform: development of PHP 4 — first released in May 2000 — stops at the end of 2007, and security fixes end in August 2008, per the PHP 4 end-of-life announcement. The stated logic is that PHP 5 is three years old, described by the project as fast, stable and production-ready, while PHP 6 is already in the pipeline.
Matt Mullenweg flags the news on Photo Matt, noting PHP.net still lacks obvious permalinks in 2007 even though the site does publish an RSS 1.0 feed — a small aside that lands amid an ongoing debate over how inconsistent feed discoverability remains across the web.
First-order effects
- Developers and site owners still running PHP 4 applications now have two dated deadlines — feature freeze at end of 2007, security updates ending August 2008 — after which unpatched installs become their own liability.
- PHP 5 becomes the only supported branch, so new deployments default to it and the project's maintenance effort concentrates there ahead of PHP 6.
Second-order effects
- Shared hosting providers, the main distribution channel for PHP, must plan parallel-stack upgrades or risk serving customers on an unsupported interpreter once August 2008 passes.
- Applications written against PHP 4 idioms face porting work to run cleanly on PHP 5, creating demand for compatibility testing and migration tooling around the deadline.
Third-order effects
- A major open-source language publishing explicit end-of-life dates normalizes lifecycle discipline for web infrastructure — shifting the burden of legacy-version risk from maintainers to operators who delay migration.
The trend: Server-side web platforms are moving toward fixed, announced end-of-life calendars that force migrations rather than supporting old versions indefinitely.