I wasn’t much in the “dev scene” when the older PHP versions were released, but I heard about the resistance there was to the upgrades through some not too old discussions about frameworks like Codeigniter and major apps like Wordpress still working with 5.2.x as their minimum PHP version.
From the “PHP scenes” I am now running around in, people seem to be flocking to PHP7. Either the maintainers of the libraries I’ve been watching have already upgraded their libraries to support PHP7 (not a lot, but some) or the users have been asking for PHP7 support en masse. In other words, PHP7 seems to be definitely catching a lot of attention.
What do you think? Will PHP7 catch on much, much better than any other PHP version in the past? Are you a library maintainer or work on one and are concerned with getting your libraries “PHP7 Ready”? Or are your users asking you for the support? Share your thoughts.
I believe PHP 7 will catch on faster than we have seen in the past, mainly due to the speed improvements. I also believe the PHP community have learned from the PHP 4 to PHP 5 fiasco, and that we are more open to switch to a newer version now.
We are already developing for PHP 7 as switching to this on our next release means our clients can reduce their server park compared to now.
Though, it is important to note, this is enterprise and we can “decide” what software/versions is needed to run the application, and “cost effective” play a huge part in deciding this. If this was a open source project like Wordpress, it is more difficult to make a hard switch like we are doing now.
A better performing PHP would also mean shared servers could handle more traffic theoretically too. Although, I’d venture to say, some hosters over sell shared hosting to begin with. At least with PHP7, they could lower the potential for upsetting customers with overloaded servers. LOL!
Ok. But, who is the start of the upgrade circle? The hosters, the developers or the users? I say, it is the developers. Without them, there can be no upgrade.
Hardware/Infrastructure has changed alot. Most shared hosts are running some form of VM environment so it makes upgrading PHP/running different versions concurrently easier. You can just spin up a new cluster nowadays in a few minutes and all your new customers are running the latest and greatest while you old customers are still running legacy.
Same with a lot of smaller companies, very few people have a box sitting in a datacentres with 100’s of websites running off of it.
Once hosters start to upgrade their servers to PHP 7 I expect we’ll see “my site has stopped working” threads where the cause will be their sites using the old mysql_* extension
You are right. The VM environments allow the customers to upgrade more easily. However, VMs are just like dedicated servers from a administrative standpoint (if they aren’t managed). There are still a good number of hosters, who are still selling webspace on shared servers. 1&1, GoDaddy and Hostgator, just to name a few.
Of course we will - they’ve only had five or so years to think about the upgrade - not like with HTML where they have had 19 years to think about upgrading from HTML 3 and most still haven’t finished.