26 replies to this topic

[raymor]

DunWeb, on 18 March 2011 - 11:18 AM, said:

Yes, sooner or later they will update, but writing a software program that 50% (just guessing on this) can't use seems redundant.  What if they don't update for 2 years ?  That means v3.x may be out of date before it is even really used.

Chris

If this were C, Perl, or any other stable programming language I would agree.
However, PHP was not originally written as a general purpose programming language.
Rather, PHP was intended to be a CMS and was itself originally written in Perl.
As a CMS system, not a programming language, PHP was not all that suitable for
general programming. It had several major issues, not the least of which were
ridiculous security problems.  The PHP team has been working very hard and making
great strides in developing PHP into a real language appropriate for serious
projects like OsCommerce.  PHP 5.3 is a much better language than PHP 4.x was,
and PHP 6.0 (not yet released) is actually a pretty solid platform. Given that it
is PHP we're talking about, and given that the old style PHP code is so aweful
compare to the latest version, I think that leveraging these great improvements
in PHP 5.3 was a great idea.

Some web hosts don't support 5.3 right now, true, but many do.  We offer hosting with 5.3 for example.
Last year about 88% of all server hacks were caused by bugs in old PHP code.
Some hosting companies stick with old broken systems which are easily hacked,
while some see the tremendous improvements, including the much better security,
and offer you something far more solid.  To me, using old PHP versions and not
even offering a solid version tells me that's a host I would think twice about using.
Yes, some very popular hosts use old crappy versions.  AOL is also very popular,
but that in no way means it's the best.

Edited by raymor, 19 April 2011 - 03:33 PM.

[Cymon Sez]

For those of you complaining about the lack of hosts not supporting 5.3, take some of that money you have earned using FREE SOFTWARE and invest in a real host.  

Thank You to the OSC Team for taking the time to think ahead.

[danieliser]

Update.. Hostgator has update all shared hosting and if you have a vps or dedicated and dont want to do it yourself you can contact thier support department and have 5.3 up in less than an hour. All new accounts should have this installed already.

[MrPhil]

raymor, on 19 April 2011 - 03:29 PM, said:

If this were C, Perl, or any other stable programming language I would agree.
However, PHP was not originally written as a general purpose programming language.
Rather, PHP was intended to be a CMS and was itself originally written in Perl.
As a CMS system, not a programming language, PHP was not all that suitable for
general programming. It had several major issues, not the least of which were
ridiculous security problems.

PHP was originally "Personal Home Page Tools" and was a specialized language (written in Perl) designed to ease the production of Web pages. It has evolved over time into "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" and is a fairly general and stable programming language that happens to shine as a Web page platform. You wouldn't try producing a Web page in FORTRAN, and you wouldn't dream of doing complex numerical analysis in PHP (although either language could, after much hitting of thumbs with the hammer, sort of do the other's job).

I would take issue that it was originally a CMS. It wasn't, at least not in the sense of Drupal, Joomla, or even Wordpress. Perhaps you have a nonstandard definition of "Content Management System". PHP started as a specialized programming language or toolkit running on top of Perl (a general purpose programming language), oriented towards producing Web pages. And yes, there have been many security issues that have been addressed over the years.

[helldesign]

On my hosting www.turbowebs.com.ar have the  5.3 php version!

[infodel]

DunWeb, on 18 March 2011 - 11:18 AM, said:

Yes, sooner or later they will update, but writing a software program that 50% (just guessing on this) can't use seems redundant.  What if they don't update for 2 years ?  That means v3.x may be out of date before it is even really used.

Stepping ahead is fine, but abandoning what is currently in use makes no sense.  It is like building a car that runs on a fuel that isn't available to most of the world.  A bad decision IMO.




Chris

I share the thoughts Chris, I just found out that my host ipower.com/ipowerweb.com is on 5.2.17 and no plans to upgrade even when I offered to buy 10 hosting accounts and then continuous monthly referrals of new accounts as we'd refer our resellers to ipower... is it too costly to upgrade!!??

[DunWeb]

Aj,

It doesn't make any difference at this time as the current release of 3.01 is not ready for production use anyway.




Chris