PHP 4 is dead! Long live PHP 5!
In a somewhat expected announcement from July 13, 2007 the PHP development team has proclaimed that it will no longer release new versions of the PHP4 branch of the popular server-side scripting language. Support will continue until the end of 2007, security fixes will still be released if necessary by August 8, 2008.
It was during the era of the PHP 4.x version releases when the famous Open Source server side language reached its maturity and a dominant share of the market for dynamically built web sites. Although PHP4 had a pretty solid object oriented programming (OOP) support, the realities of Web 2.0, with its cross-platform and cross-technology requirements mandated a major overhaul of the language. A new versioning branch was commenced three years ago - PHP5 - which is built from the ground up as an OOP language. PHP 5 would not be the end of the line though. The development of PHP 6 is well under way, soon to be released in a stable format.
For more information visit
http://php.net/