Programming languages always progress and change. Bugs are found and patched, and so are security holes in the language. PHP Group and the PHP Community has always prided itself in making sure developers have the best and most secure code available. Because of this, PHP – like many languages – will End Of Life (EOL) an older version, no longer maintaining them for bug and security updates for that version.
In the next week, you will notice a new release of the PHP SDK that requires you to update your version of PHP to at least 5.4-stable. After joining Stormpath full time last week, it’s been my top priority to ensure the SDK is on track and up to the standards of our other SDKs. Its critical to ensure that our SDKs have the best security support available, and we hope this helps add support new features that were not available in PHP version 5.3.
From PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4
The plan to remove support for PHP 5.3 has been in the works since earlier in 2015. There were some very good additions to this version of PHP: Namespaces, closures, and PHAR. These HUGE additions represented huge progress for PHP when they were made back in mid 2009.
Fast forward six years: as the language progressed into 5.4, more and more great additions were added to PHP. We could not use them, because we were still supporting an older version.
What the 5.3 End of Life Mean for the PHP SDK?
If you are still using PHP 5.3 you will not be able to upgrade the Stormpath PHP SDK package past 1.6.0-beta, as we will be implementing some features that are not available in PHP 5.3 We understand this can be a major pain for our customers, but we hope for the security of your users that you will plan an upgrade to 5.4.
We will be releasing a major update to the SDK in the coming weeks to include these features, and end 5.3 support.
If you have any questions or issues during regarding the SDK, please let us know. Contact us at support@stormpath.com and we will be happy to help you.
The Roadmap for PHP Support at Stormpath
For full transparency into our plans for minimum PHP version support, here is a chart that shows the roadmap of PHP version support in the Stormpath SDK:
Going forward, we will follow closely with the EOL support provided by the PHP community. Once a version of the language is EOL from PHP, we will also release a new version of the SDK that requires you to upgrade your version to at least the lowest supported version of PHP.
We always suggest that you keep your PHP version up to the latest stable version, for your security and that of your customers. At the time of this writing would be version 5.6, with PHP 7 right around the corner.
Stormpath is committed to making this transition as easy as possible and would like to remind you again that you can always contact support@stormpath.com for any questions or issues you may have during your upgrade of PHP.