5 July 2007 — A consortium of PHP developers has announced today that several leading Open Source PHP projects will be dropping support for older versions of PHP in upcoming releases of their software as of February 5, 2008 as part of a joint effort to move the PHP developer community fully onto PHP version 5.

Most PHP based web applications today run in both PHP version 4 and PHP version 5. PHP 4 was released in 2000, and quickly cemented itself as one of the dominant web development languages. Version 5 was released in 2004 with dramatic improvements in functionality, but adoption has been slow due mostly to the "chicken and egg" problem that accompanies many new platform releases.

By pre-announcing plans to require PHP 5.2 in upcoming software versions in 2008, GoPHP5 hopes to provide web hosts with the incentive to upgrade their servers to newer, more stable, more feature rich versions of PHP as well as sufficient time to do so. Users that are already using current versions of participating projects won't be left out in the cold, either. All involved projects will continue to support current releases on PHP 4 for their normal life cycle, giving both users and hosts time to plan and implement an upgrade.

PHP is a widely used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. PHP is one of the leading web development languages in the world, running on a third of the world's web servers. It is the platform of choice for companies from Yahoo to Facebook as well as the most widely available development platform on shared hosting, which powers millions of web sites world wide.

Full press release can be found at the official GoPHP5 website.

[tags]gophp5, web development, programming, php, tech news[/tags]