Patrick Allaert has put together a shell command that can take your PHP4 code and replace its current constructors with PHP5-formatted ones.

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".

In this new post to his blog till argues his case for PEAR and why support for PHP4 is a good thing when it comes to making things "just work."

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.

In a new post to his blog today, Brandon Savage talks about the "fade time" for PHP4 and how, really, it's gone on long enough.

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.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article that will interest developers still looking to make the jump from PHP4 to PHP5 (you know who you are) with Informix support. Zend Core can help.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a real world benchmark as justification for moving from a PHP 4 to PHP 5 environment - evidence from Flickr's change.

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.

In a recent post Quinton Parker looks at some of his experiences in preparing for and taking the Zend Certified Engineer test. He compares the experiences of taking the PHP4 version (in 2005) and more recently taking the PHP5 (in 2009).

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

The devReview.com website has put together The Big List of as many of the PHP frameworks out there they could find:

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.

On his blog today Gopal Vijayaraghavan has posted about the release of the latest version of the APC sofware (Alternative PHP Cache) - version 3.1.2.

Finally, after nearly a year of work, it's into a release. Some new stuff has sneaked into it undocumented, that people might find interesting - apc.preload_path would be one of them. The backend memory allocation has been re-done - the api part by me and the internals by shire. There's a hell of a lot of new code in there, both rewritten and added. Tons of php4 cruft removed, php5 stuff optimized, made more stable, then less stable, made faster, then applied brakes. Made leak-proof, quake-proof and in general, idiot-proof. So, on & so forth.

To show the difference, he includes a diff of the current version against the previous - 68 files changed, 3255 insertions and 5545 deletions.

Adam Hosker has posted some of the differences between PHP4 and PHP5 to help you make the transition.

He's broken it up into a few different sections:

• Language Features
• Objects
• Magic Methods
• Selected New Extensions
• Error Management

Each of the sections has several subpoints detailing changes, updates and tips. The post is a part of his studies working up to talking the Zend Certified Engineer test.

Correcting himself from some previous comments concerning PHP 5 versus PHP 4 usage among developers, Marco Tabini has posted something new to his blog with some updated stats.

In the past, I have not been shy about sharing my opinion that the impending death of PHP 4 would have wreaked all sorts of havoc over the PHP world. I am glad to say that I've been wrong - dead wrong, in fact - and that I have never been as happy to be so far off the mark before.

According to a readers survey that the php|architect magazine ran (about a year ago even) PHP 5 is stronger than ever, taking up well over sixty percent of the usage with only a small part still hanging with PHP 4. Check out his graph for the full rankings.