what's the lowdown on php5

[Aurisor]

Now that I'm digging into PHP4, I'm finding some of its oop woefully inadequate. What's the consensus on using PHP5 for a production server? Is it considered stable and secure enough for real-world, intensive use yet? If not, when will it be?

[keli]

PHP 5 is "not recomended" simply as it's not as wide-spread and heavily tested as PHP4 is. But it is "production stable", although I guess most developers stick to PHP4 by the lines of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it"

If I consider, that php developers are still not reccomending Apache2, I say all this is just a bit of paranoia. Especially, if you're doing your own development, and you (more or less) know your tools, I don't see any serious reason, why to avoid PHP5, if you need it's features.
_________________
"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."
Marshall McLuhan, 1969

[chrisMc]

From what I've read, the main reason PHP5 is not widely used is that it currently only works with the prefork server model in Apache2. You cannot use it with the threaded models. That being said, I use PHP5 on all of my servers. I use the XML-RPC/SOAP features that are not natively available in PHP4 (there are hack-ish include files that offer a lot, but aren't nearly as good). PHP5 is the only way to go for web services. You may run in to a few PHP apps that don't run correctly on PHP5, but the problems are usually well-known and easy to fix unless you're running CVS branches of the apps. It seems that all of the major apps/libraries are now up to speed for PHP5.

[faugusztin]