specializing in digital media technologies

About two months ago, Johannes Schlüter posted about the Future of PHP 6. Schlüter works for MySQL (and therefore Oracle-Sun) and is an active and involved member of the PHP team. In his post, Schlüter discusses the difficult choices facing PHP with respect to the intended version 6 and its support for Unicode. In turns out that changing all of PHP to support Unicode isn’t as easy as one would have thought. And, of course, it was originally considered to be, well, hard. Apparently, this struggle is the reason PHP 6 is still nowhere to be found (in fact, the source code has slowly been disappearing from PHP’s snaps site). So now, the PHP team is regrouping in order to go forward and we’re not exactly sure when or how Unicode support will be integrated into PHP, or how this change affects the next few versions of PHP, both minor (i.e., 5.3) and major (6 and 7).

As a person that wrote a book on PHP 6 quite some time ago, and has looked more and more silly over time, I’m happy to hear this news, even if we don’t yet know what the end result will be. Granted, most of that book uses PHP 5 and PHP 6 (the version that was available when I wrote it) is only required by like 5-10% of the material, but still…lesson learned on my part: especially when it comes to open source software, there’s just no predicting what’s going to happen next. So, for the time being, let’s be happy with the PHP we have and keep an eye on where the development team goes with this. I know I sure will!

The makers of EasyPHP, an all-in-one Apache, PHP, and MySQL installer for Windows, also provides a PHP 6 version if you’re interested in experimenting with the next major version of the language (as I demonstrate in my PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites book). I haven’t personally used EasyPHP (I try to avoid using Windows, if at all possible), but from what I can tell it seems to be a quality, well-supported product. EasyPHP is available for free although donations are encouraged.

A reader posted a question in the forum the other day and indicated they were using PHP 6 on a shared hosting account. It’s absolutely fantastic when people include their PHP (or whatever) version when they ask questions, but, more to the point, I was surprised to see PHP 6 being offered, since it hasn’t been officially released yet. But, yes, SiteGround offers hosting accounts with several different versions of PHP. I know nothing of the company or the quality of their hosting, but if you want to try PHP 6, without installing it on your own computer, this is a cheap option.