The PHP official website has just announced an “end of life” statement for PHP 4. What the statement basically says is that development for PHP 4 will only be continued until the end of this year. Support for PHP 4 will basically end this year on December 31, 2007. However, security fixes will still be released for PHP 4 until August 8, 2008.

This will cause a major impact in the current server set-up being used today. Currently, a majority of hosting companies and servers still uses PHP 4 installed by default. Will this cause a shift in the hosting companies to migrate to PHP 5? This year is going to be a turning point for web scripting languages. This will be the perfect opportunity for other scripting languages such as Python and Ruby to finally catch up. Will the balance of power finally shift? Only time will tell