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Should Drupal for Facebook support PHP4?

Dave Cohen
Submitted by Dave Cohen on Fri, 10/26/2007 - 12:43

At the moment Drupal for Facebook runs on either PHP4 or PHP5. I'd like to take an informal poll: do you care about PHP4 support?

A little background: Facebook provides two PHP APIs. One for PHP4 and one for PHP5. Drupal for Facebook can detect which is running, and include the appropriate API. But if the API for PHP5 is included, it throws exceptions, which must be caught by Drupal for Facebook. In order to catch the exceptions, our code must become PHP5 only. Therefore we must drop PHP4 support entirely if we are to use Facebook's PHP5 client API.

So, In order to support PHP4, we must use Facebook's PHP4 client API, even when our server is running PHP5. As far as I know, this does not limit functionality. But it may affect performance (I'm not sure) and makes the installation a little harder (one must install the client API for PHP4 and also simplexml).

Drupal itself has embraced the gophp5.org approach. This means any release after Feb 5, 2008 will require PHP 5.2 or higher. The idea being to give ISPs more than enough time to bring their servers up to date. My feeling is that Drupal for Facebook should follow suit, and continue to support PHP4 as long as it runs on Drupal 5.x or 6.x.

What do you think? Is PHP4 support important to you? Would you prefer to drop PHP4 and use the PHP5 client API? Or are you neutral about it?

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What is the diffrence between

Submitted by SEO on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 07:41.

What is the diffrence between PHP4 and PHP5 ?
seo

im not sure. but i think

Submitted by John Winter on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 08:20.

im not sure. but i think php4 support is important to me. sometimes the new one is not good. such as i like adobe Acrobat 7.0 more than 9.0.

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Old but still shocking

Submitted by Nicolaus Bauman on Sat, 12/22/2007 - 06:42.

I know this is a really old post.

But really it is crazy to use PHP4 for any new code. You should give it the heave-ho but fast.

PHP4 and older is best described as fundamentally lametarded. Really, the object model of PHP4 and earlier is a complete joke. So much so that I'm certain it would be the number one language in the world right now if they would gone with the approach that is PHP5 long ago. Drupal's design was attenuated so much by older PHP versions, I find it downright unpleasant to code in, and it's not Drupal developers fault (except that they chose PHP to being with).

It's not fun to have to remember that:

$something['is']->['stored'][$under]->something

in such a stupid way. Where it could be:

something.isStored(under(something))

which is much nicer and more directly OOP.

No/ well maybe...

Submitted by Christopher T on Fri, 11/16/2007 - 07:04.

As of December 31 2007 php4 has been deprecated. Most hosting companies realize this and are starting to make the move to php5 anyways. Although if supporting php4 is not limiting the development of FB4drupal, then i guess it makes sense to cover the edge cases, for a time at least.

The people that will use

Submitted by Sebastian Daniel on Wed, 11/14/2007 - 21:01.

The people that will use Drupal for Facebook will be mostly developers/geeks - those kind of users rather use a development version with extra features than an outdated version.
So I am the same opinion as Hone.

Seems pretty unanimous that

Submitted by Dave Cohen on Fri, 11/09/2007 - 00:10.

Seems pretty unanimous that noone needs PHP4. My plan is to convert DFF to Drupal 6 before too long, and at that time drop support for PHP4. Until then though, I'll leave things as they are.

Moved to PHP5

Submitted by Jose Rey on Wed, 11/07/2007 - 03:20.

The idea of drupal for facebook was all the incentive to get an account with a hosting company that has PHP5. I say sacrifice PHP4 support and the complications that it would bring for better project in general.

Yes Jose Rey, I agree with

Submitted by Doğan Ünal on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 21:02.

Yes Jose Rey,

I agree with you. Thanks a lot for this.

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sohbet

No

Submitted by Adam Moore on Tue, 10/30/2007 - 15:37.

PHP5 is where everyone is going to go or already is. I would rather their be more time spent on features and bug fixes than support for PHP4. I would even wager most of your audience that will use this module is on PHP 5.

Screw PHP4

Submitted by Nathan Haug on Sat, 10/27/2007 - 20:35.

With PHP4 ending it's life soon anyway, there's no point in holding back code that could be more efficient or better architected when building a top-tier tool (which I believe D4F is.

Thanks Dave! This is an awesome project!

I say PHP5

Submitted by Hone Watson on Wed, 10/31/2007 - 01:30.

I think its a waste of time doing PHP4.

If you're ever going to create an application that can scale surely you'd have to have your own server and control over what version php5 is?

Thanks.

Submitted by Garry Burns (not verified) on Mon, 06/09/2008 - 18:35.

Hone Watson, i agree with you.
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