A few days ago a new repository popped up on our internal Mercurial server. We're not particularly creative with our naming, so it was simply CodeIgniterNoPhp4. [...] With only a handful of significant changes to its codebase, the release was pushed along. We want to make CI 2 worth its name, so starting today, we're requiring PHP 5.1.6 on our master branch.

They include a few things to watch out for including naming conventions, the change to __construct, a cleaner model object interface and chaining added to the email and validation libraries.

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title '" we're finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

The last version that will fully support PHP4 will be v3.1 and will be released in late 2010. The next version (v3.2) will jump the requirement up to PHP 5.2. According to their statistics, only around 10% of the installs are on PHP4. They also found that less than 6% of users were on MySQL 4. See the full post for complete details.

I've been meaning to write this post nearly a month now, on the heels of WordPress 3.0′s release and preparing for an inevitable future discussion of when we should drop PHP 4 support. And then current events give you the hook you need to sit down and do it.

He talks about WordPress 3.0, the support of PHP Earthlink offered, how their PHP4 usage stands currently, efforts they've done to get people to make the move up from PHP4 versions, PHP5 market penetration and more.

It assumes your classes are always declared with the class keyword starting at the beginning of the line and that your files have the .php extension.

It uses a regular expression in a perl command to search through the current directory and look for the ".php" files to replace the "function ClassName" sort of thing with a "function __construct".

Every once in someone likes to argue that PEAR is all fugly PHP4 code and why you should not use it, and instead go and use another framework or component library. Most of those people also say that they looked at or used PEAR x years ago and then act all surprised when someone else disagrees.

He talks about some of the rules around the major/minor PEAR releases and backwards compatibility breaks which, thankfully, a lot of other projects seem to adhere to. He points out that some packages have been started for different PHP generations (Mail_Queue2 vs Mail_Queue) and a few reasons why the PHP4 EON doesn't automatically mean PEAR should follow suit.

Sadly, developing for PHP 4 backwards compatibility is something that companies and individuals are still doing. Wordpress released a new Widget API in version 2.8 that relies on the old-style PHP 4 constructor. Apparently, for Wordpress and many other developers, wide adoption is more important than language improvements.

This all came about because he noticed the Log PEAR package still supported PHP4. He's been making updates, though, to bring it out of the shadows and into the light of PHP5-only support.

Still, I look forward to the day when PHP 4 finally does go away forever, leaving us with a much better code base and happier developers.

There are many business web applications written in PHP4 that use the Informix module for data access. PHP4 is no longer supported and as a result will not be issued any more fixes or releases. Since version 5.2, the Informix module is no longer available for the PDO module. In this article I'll to describe how to compile and install the Informix module on the Zend Core 2.5 (PHP 5.2.6)

The tutorial helps you set up your environment and build/install the Informix module to be plugged into the Zend Core stack. Activation is as simple as going into the Zend Core admin tool and enabling the extension. A sample script is included to test the results.

Its also noted in the comments that there's a PDO driver for Informix that can be pulled from the PECL extension repository.

Benchmarks such as the PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark I posted quite a while ago on this blog are synthetic. They test "raw bytecode execution" speed that cannot be translated into real-world situations per se. Flickr recently migrated from PHP 4 to PHP 5. And here are their real world numbers.

The graph shows a dramatic drop in processing needed (CPU usage) at the moment they made the switch over from PHP4 to PHP5.The system processing usage stayed about the same (system processes like logging and memory handling) but the user CPU usage (like what the web server would use) saw an immediate change by almost twenty percent.

Back in early 2005 the Zend certification first became available for PHP4. At that time I had roughly 2 years php experience. No South Africans were certified at that time. Barely 100 certified engineers worldwide. What a great achievement if I could join the elite few. [...] From purchasing the certification goods all the way to writing the exam it was a smooth experience and most worthwhile.

His experience with the PHP5 didn't quite go as well as the PHP4 version. He felt that the study guide lacked some of the depth the new version of the language needed and that, while it is a nice system, the Vulcan testing from php|architect needs a little bit of work. He still passed the test, though, and became the only South African to hold both PHP4 and PHP5 certifications

For the start of a new year, it was time to clean out the list of PHP frameworks. A few have fallen by the wayside, but many new ones have been added. It seems that patterns and MVC is still all the rage, but less are professing to being Rails clones, though the inspiration of convention is still strong. There are a wide variety of framework types. From full stack (cakePHP, Symfony) to components (eZ), a bit of both (Zend) and minimalist (LightVC, TinyMVC, Pluf).

Requirements to be on the list include that the framework must be PHP-based, have a recent code release in the last 12 months, needs to be available in English and not including frameworks that can be considered content systems themselves.

As of the time of this post, there are around 50 active frameworks listed - everything from CakePHP and the Zend Framework out to eZ Components and Prado. Links for each include their project homepage and some reviews the site has done.