"PHP version 5.1.0" Is this for real?!

I noticed that the frequency of your updates (sometimes twice a day) had moved you to the top of my "SPAMMER" list,. So I went back to your page to view your change notes. As I did so, I happened to also notice that the "PHP version" listed on the header is "5.1.0".

PLEASE tell me that this is a mistake and that you are not really developing classes using a version of PHP that was released in Nov, 2005!!

(http://php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.1.0)

Isue reporting from users can come from several sources :
1) this site
2) my github repository
3) www.pdftotext.eu

When I update the github repository, phpclasses automatically imports the modifications and posts a mail. It does this once a day.

The "sometimes twice a day issue" dates from yesterday, when I realized that shortly after having posted a new version to github, I had introduced a blocking regression. Unfortunately, the phpclasses automatic import process had occurred meanwhile. So I had to manually perform a second import process with another version that fixed the regression. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regarding the support of PHP 5.1 : no, I'm not kidding ! although the initial targeted version was 5.6 (and 7), I had more and more issues reported because it used syntactic constructs introduced only in PHP 5.6. Not all of them were able to install a more recent version, because they had to cope with an environment they could not change.

One day, a very proactive user told me that he would love to be able to run this class on his Apple machine, running 5.2.6. He did significant work to adapt the source code for that, and we have had many many exchanges.

Since each class update generated some work for him to adapt the modified source code, one day I told myself : "ok, I will transform the source so that it will be backward-compatible down to version 5.2.6". So we worked together to test the new backward-compatible intermediate releases until reaching a point were he could download my new releases without having to modify the code.

By pure curiosity, I wanted to know what would be the lowest supportable PHP version. This led me to 5.1 (and I would also tried 5.0, should it have supported interfaces).

So that was for the story. For your information, the code I initially developed for a customer and that gave me the idea of implementing this class had to work with versions of PHP from 4 to 5 !

I'm not judging people who have to work with version olders than the state-of-the-art-and-lightning-fast-and-beautiful PHP 7.1, simply because they are living in an IT environment over which they have no control. As a Chinese quote says : "don't blame the well to be too deep, it is your rope which is too short".

To sum up : I'm not testing new releases of my class down to PHP 5.1 ; I'm testing it with my current version, 5.6.27. If people have some issues with a different PHP version using my latest releases, they are free and warmly welcome to report me the issue.

But I'm providing backward compatibility down to version 5.1. And, believe me, the changes I had to perform to put in place this backward compatibility are not so numerous and made several users happy !

Hope this answers your question,
Christian.

The PHP Version listed in the package header is not the version it is being developed on, it is the minimum version required to run the script.

You probably will not see many classes developed which support version 4 anymore, since version 5 is when PHP introduced support for true Object Oriented Programming. PHP didn't even start deprecating anything until version 5.3. As you can see, PHP has always been very good at backwards compatibility.

Dave

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I didn't realize the purpose of the "version" info in the box.

I recently had a very expensive issue, due to transferring sites written with PHP 5.3 and NOT forward compatible with forward versions due to "mysql_..." vs "mysqli_..." code.

Thanks Dave for the clarification...

I understand your return on experience, Jack : I once had to convert an application developed in PHP 4 to make it run on PHP 5 ; it was a tough task !

As Dave said, the indicated version is the minimum one required to run the package, not the targeted one (which should be the latest php version).

However, if you have issues with intermediate versions falling in this range, you are welcome to report them !

To Christian's comment, I should mention to you that my "thank you" was intended for BOTH of you!