PHP4 or PHP5

As more and more hosting providers offer PHP5 as part of their PHP hosting package, developers are faced with a choice: should you stick with PHP4 or migrate your applications to PHP5. It depends:

If you’re starting a new project using POG, we highly recommend starting fresh with PHP5. This is the version we ourselves use when creating applications. Why? POG is best appreciated if your entire application is object-oriented (not just the db related stuff that POG does). Cool Things in PHP5 and Go PHP5 are two good resources that give some additional information about why you should consider upgrading to PHP5.

When we started the POG project a year and a half ago, PHP5 adoption was already accelerating; Nevertheless, unlike other ORM libraries or frameworks, we decided to still support PHP4 with almost the same feature-set as PHP5 in order to be useful to the broadest base possible. PHP4 used to be the default language on the POG frontpage. In 3.0 however, PHP5 is now the default language. This does not mean, however, that we are going to drop support for PHP4 anytime soon.

In fact, POG itself, is written for PHP4 and needs some tweaking to run on PHP5. We plan to re-write it soon so it can be run on systems running PHP5.

How about old-er projects? Should you upgrade? Depends. If you’re application is based on POG, we believe upgrading should be a breeze. If you intend to add major features to your project, we recommend you upgrade to PHP5. Support for object-related ‘stuff’ is simply better, while in PHP4, ‘hacks’ are often required. If your project is nearing the end of its lifecycle, then upgrading doesn’t seem worth the effort.