PHP 5 for Sugar 5? Speak Now....

[Jacob]

It is time for Sugar to take advantage of everything PHP 5 has to offer. My plan is to require PHP 5 starting with Sugar 5 next year. I’d like to get your feedback on this plan.

I have been watching the evolution of PHP 5 over the past three years. Sugar has been supporting PHP 5 for almost as long. Generally, I have been quite impressed. PHP 5 has proven to be scalable, stable, and well thought-out.

There are some major advantages to requiring PHP 5 as the minimum PHP version for Sugar that would greatly benefit you, the users of Sugar around the world. Some of these advantages include:

• Better support for Object Oriented programming.
• Allowing us to build more clearly defined APIs
• Better performance
• Eliminating some code that is required to support both PHP 4 and PHP 5.
• Easier integration with external Web Services (native SOAP API) and XML manipulation
• Ability to leverage the latest in third party components (new logger infrastructures, more data layers, newer code snippets, ...)

I am seeing that almost all hosting providers now provide support for PHP 4 and PHP 5. Most Linux packages now provide support for PHP 5 in their update managers. PHP 5 has been available for download for several years. PHP 5.1 is holding up well in all of our high-intensity load testing. PHP 5.2 has just been released and is shaping up to be a really stable and well-performing version.

At this point, it is my belief that most people have access to PHP 5, could switch to it, or could selectively convert their Sugar servers over to PHP 5.

However, I am very sensitive to making any changes to the minimum requirements for Sugar. Before making PHP 5 a minimum requirement for Sugar 5.0, I wanted to get your thoughts on this. Please respond to the poll and optionally post your thoughts.

Thanks,
Jacob

[longreach]

Works for us - we already have the bulk of our clients on PHP 5.x.

[chrisky]

PHP 5 - two thumbs up!

Can I ask 'Why wait till Sugar 5?' lol

Hey if need be, Sugar could always include a short 'how-to on upgrading PHP' in the Sugar installation documentation..

Go with the majority and ignore the minority..

[tdp]

Heck, even Slackware is distributing PHP 5 these days. If a Linux distro that conservative is moving, I see no reason why Sugar shouldn't.

[malcolmh]

It seems that a lot of the ISP's here in Germany still have only PHP Version 4.x rather than PHP5 installed on their Mangaged servers.

[simple]

For Debian stable release PHP5 should be available beginning of next year. So I guess it's okay to have PHP5 as a requirement for Sugar 5.0

[lvangool]

I think you shouldn't hold back Sugar by maintaining compatability with PHP 4. Not if PHP5 is a real improvement to Sugar (which you state).

[kpit]

I fully support the move to PHP 5. which also provides reflection in objects which is very good for bean development and OO programming.

While you are at it you might want to make the jump to MySQL 5 which supports views and triggers and procedural language for offloading PHP from preforming SQL work that can be handled by Views and Triggers much more effeciently than they can be handled in php. For example updating a table to trigger an audit trail event and logging. The views can provide pre defined relational views of many tables that looks like a single table making it a simple sql Query which is more efficent that join queries and can be filtered by where clauses to shorten the veiw queried.

[Scott_Savage]

The latest versions of PHP 5 (5.2.1 in particular) GREATLY improve the stability of PHP on Windows Servers. I am running Sugar 4 on PHP 5 and feel that it far exceeds the stability and performance of PHP4. Definitely make the move and simplify development (and hosting) as much as possible please...

[Jacob]

PHP 5.2.1 and above are highly recommended if you are running on the Windows stack.

PHP 5.2.2 now has a built in JSON encoder that handles UTF8 and high-ASCII data. We are going to build a test into the code to determine if the algorithm is working correctly and adapt the system appropriately.

We are building more and more components that are PHP5 native.

Jacob