Anyone know good php4 and php5 popularity comparison?

Hi, does anyone have any good and up-to-date comparison of popularity of php4 and php5 languages nowadays? A good article with php4 and php5 popularity trends would be much appreciated! Thanks.

 

Why do you need this? You should no longer focus on PHP4. PHP 5 has been out for many years now and is what you should focus on. PHP 4 is no longer supported. Most hosts have PHP 5 support and if they don't, they suck. (Sorry for the choice of word)

 

There is just something about premiumscripts that I adore

 

Maybe it's not clear. But I need the comparison link anyway. And I need it so much. Let me explain to make it clear. I am php script developer and I have several thousands of customers. They contact me from time to time for support and according to my preliminary assessment 1/3 of them have php4. I haven't done any detailed study to confirm these share, but I know that a lot of people have php4. So I would like to confirm these numbers and to know how many people have php4 and what php4 popularity trend is. That is it. Yes, i do know php4 is no longer supported, yes, I do know php6 is coming. I know this all well, but market is market. Since people use php4 there is no problem for me to support this version. I hope it's clear now. So anyone has a link to php4 and php5 popularity trends? Thanks.

 

It looks like you've already done your own market research and you've come to 33%. Why worry about another market? YOU'RE market is 33% usage of PHP4.

If you do custom programming on a client-to-client basis, use what is available to each particular client. If this is a widely distributed app, make it well known that you are supporting one version. If this is a hosted app, who cares what other people are running. Could you be a wee bit more specific in what it is you offer?

You can easily find differences between PHP4 & PHP5, but to find popularity of who has one version installed versus the other would be mind boggling and darn near impossible to get a reliable number. premiumscripts is correct, PHP5 has been out since, yeesh, mid-2004?

I used to work for a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions development firm, and I know (at least) all of their small biz servers are relegated to PHP4, because not only would it take forever to upgrade all those servers but nearly every bit of code on them would come to a screeching halt.

 

knowlegde passes several stages like: "no it's not true", guesses, rumors, random evidences, scientific research and statistics. Obviously I didn't do any research that's why I'm looking for an article of php4 and php5 popularity comparison. I don't have my own research. Like I said my php4 popularity info located at "guesses" stage. I've talked to 4-5 clients of 20 who contacted me last week and they told me that they have php4. I don't know what other 16 people have. That's why I need the comparison. Again, I don't have any research otherwise why would I spend your and my time asking the same on boards.

Umm, didn't i tell that I have web script? And several thousands of customers who install my script on php4-5 platforms? I hope it's clear that I don't do custom programming. I sell script.

Not sure if my question is clear again. Let me clarify the second time: I'm not entirely interested in difference between php4, php5, C# or any other languages, nor I had a question about object-oriented support in php5, nor I had a question about algorithms theory, theta functions, data sctictures, functional programming, etc.

The main idea I had was what popularity trends of php4 and php5? I anyone found such an article to that research - it will be great for me and I would very-very appreciate this! If I had a link to that article or did such research - I would share it immediately for everyone. Thanks.

 

Are those users who say they have php 4 really sure they do? I mean, I wouldn't trust end users with that kind of thing.. Additionally, there are hosts that have a "switch" button so that they can switch from php 4 to php 5, this for compatability reasons. Perhaps they are on such a host. I believe godaddy does this.

Anyway, I haven't seen such an article and it would need to be continuously updated. All I know is that the most common shared hosting servers all support PHP 5 and that will only improve.

 

yeah, but why for example one of the most well-knows blog scripts called Wordpress supports php4?

 

Well, wordpress is already quite old, developed during the time that php 5 was not yet out. Switching now would mean that alot of wordpress plugins and themes would cease to work. I suppose if you're not using any of the features of php 5 that you can just code your project in php 4.

 

Well-well.. hold on a sec! How can a lot of php4 themes stop to work on php5 platforms? How is that possible when php has backward compatibility and php4 scripts and themes will work on php5 without major changes or even without any changes at all?

 

Well, to make good use of PHP 5 wordpress would need a complete rewrite, yes, they could do some small changes but that doesn't take advantage of PHP 5. (it already runs on php 5). Yes they could hack in support but it's better to start fresh with this kind of change.

 

usually noone needs full support of php5 in this situation, people who develop demandable scripts need support of as many platforms as possible and the founder of Wordpress wrote in his blog that they are not going to move to php5 while there are not less than 10% of php4 users. The main thing for me is that he didn't mension what is current amount of php4 users, but at least I have the lower bound. It's interesting what is the current value.

 

hey guys, according to this research, a year ago php4.x was installed on majority platforms. and more popular than php5.x. If anyone finds up-to-date line trends I would appreciate this.
here is the full article:
nexen .net/ chiffres_cles/ phpversion/

 

i can't load the source page but i assume the stats shows server with which php platform and not which one was installed that year. That just shows that a year ago a majority of hosting companies has yet to upgrade their php.

 

A year ago 50% of people were using php4. The best way for me is to have stats, not guesses. You cannot load the page because I have 5 messages on this forum and cannot post url. Try to remove spaces there: nexen .net/chiffres_cles/ phpversion/

 

Yeah well, nexen also isn't correct. You should only look at shared hosts. For all we know the tiny subset of sites that nexen queried contained alot of old, stale, non-updated sites.

Compile a list of all the shared hosts and see if they provide PHP5. Also, ask your clients what web host they use (those that do not have php5)

 

Hm. You've never sold php scripts? It's pretty obvious that we need to check both: shared hosts and dedicated (old, stale, etc, everything). I can explain the 10th time why: when customer comes to you and says he has a dedicated server and wants your script. If you wrote it in php5, all you can tell him is that he needs php5 and needs to upgrade. What is the result? In 70% of cases the customer would leave and would not come back. Why? Only because you'd queried shared hosts, thought that all people were using php5 and because you'd chosen php5 as development platform.

 

I don't really understand why you're still asking this when you've found a site that has a graph up to a year ago, and was quite clearly about to have PHP5 overtake PHP4. There is no way that it would do anything other than that, therefore PHP5 is going to be the server of choice for more than half of your customers and you should stick with that.

Put that together with the fact that PHP4 is no longer supported and its quite obvious that you don't want to be using anything other than PHP5, and for you to choose otherwise would be foolish.

Also, any of your clients that don't have PHP5 can always upgrade to it either themselves or get their hosting provider to do so.
As it's been mentioned above many hosting companies (for shared hosting anyway) have the option to switch between 4 and 5 at the user's discretion

 

Paulim, as you can gather from my username I am building a php script store myself. I found that most everyone has already transitioned to php 5 and those that are still on php 4 are not as likely to buy your scripts anyway. (Lots of scripts already require php 5, I would think that these users would already be seeking to upgrade because of that) If they have a dedicated server they can easily upgrade themselves or buy a new server. PHP 4 is obsolete and no longer updated and any shared host still running it is putting their clients at risk.

 

yeah, it's shown that php5 is overtake. For me is interesting to find up-to-date research and to see what are the exact numbers. I don't need guesses. Having statistics would be fine.

P.S. people with dedicated servers would want to reinstall their system just in order to have my small script installed. That's why I'd like to have the exact and, again, up-to-date statistics how php4 is popular.