As of now we have many frameworks which are still supporting PHP 4.x. CakePHP and CodeIgniter are leading that troop. Now we have PHP 6 about to get ready for production and PHP 5.x is in it's mature stage since long while now with PHP 5.3 as the latest release. I am not against for support on 4.x version of PHP; may great developers/teams have developed awasom tools and application and they should be still usable without any modifications in their coding.

PHP 4.x Hosting:

So PHP 4.x support for hosting is fine and it's required to keep those applications running and being hosted without any maintenance saving efforts and time. So applications developed for PHP 4.x can run as long as they wish and till there are no equivalent forks of them available in PHP 5.x or newer version.

PHP 4.x for Development:

PHP 4.4.9 has been released as final release for PHP 4.x now and it has been announced as end of life for PHP 4.x now. So developing any project or framework by keeping PHP 4.x compatibility is not a good idea I believe. All projects or framework has to freeze their PHP 4.x versions and let only bug-fixes be made available for those versions and have new feature-set addition be on the fork which is only PHP 5.x. I think every project will have to come up with a date when they will join GoPHP5 rally. For example Symfony 1.2 and 1.3 (Symfony is a PHP 5 only MVC Framework) are specifically supporting PHP 5.2.4 or newer version only.

Basically for newer development it is better idea to use version which has longer future so that finally they don't need to write a fixes which allow those projects to continue working in both the environment. Which will save time on development, QA and maintanence all phases.

I am not against the PHP 4.x but it is a change which is eneviable and which has to happen in it's completeness sometime and change is for good. I am not sure how many of you agree with my thoughts but please share your thoughts on this subjects as comments for this post.

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