Well, if you pay for virtual hosting, you can use any PHP version, but you may have to compile PHP and the Web server manually if you want a very specific version that your host has not built for you. I do that in my dedicated server but that requires some knowledge that most people do not have.
I do not think there will be many companies, or any at all, that offer pre-built PHP packages for any version, even less because when it is time to upgrade there will be a lot of FUD claiming possible security issues in no longer maintained PHP versions.
Of course you can use a wrapper class to encapsulate your database access but if you did not do that from the start, you will have a lot of work rewriting your application to use a wrapper.
I use Metabase, which more than a mere wrapper, allows you to develop applications totally independent of the database, so you can even switch to a different type of database if you need it some day.
phpclasses.org/metabase
The PHPClasses site is totally written on top of Metabase. Actually most of its database access code is generated by Metastorage, which is a ORM (Object Relational Mapper) generator tool. But that is a more advanced topic that not everybody understand it to realize how powerful it is.
metastorage.net/
As for making var declarations throw warnings, it was such a bad idea that later PHP developers removed those warnings because they were scaring people to upgrade to PHP 5.
Manuel Lemos - 2011-07-19 03:49:48 - In reply to 
