PHP 5.4 Alpha versions just started to be released. On episode 14 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the purpose and interest of the new PHP 5.4 features already implemented in these alpha releases. They also discuss the repercussion in the PHP community of the plan to deprecate the original PHP MySQL extension.

You can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

I wanted to do exactly that, and at work we use WampServer so we can easily switch between PHP versions (and it also makes enabling/disabling extensions and options very easy - if you develop on Windows, check it out). Assuming you have WampServer installed, it is fairly trivial to manually install new versions of the AMP trifecta.

There's a few things you'll need to download to get things up and running (besides the new PHP version) but the rest of the guide is simple configuration and startup. If all goes well, you should be running the alpha in less than ten minutes.

Rasmus Lerdorf today posted instructions for testing the upcoming PHP 5.4 release. Running the PHP tests and submitting the associated report will help the PHP team get PHP 5.4 ready faster as it gives them reports of failed tests from a variety of platforms. I just did this today for the first time and can tell you that it is very easy. Following are the steps that Rasmus outlined, in a bit more detail.

He lists a few things you'll need before you get started and where to grab this latest code from. He describes the make/make test process and what you might see if one of the tests fail. You can find the results of the failed test submissions on the Test Reports page.

We already have the php5.4 alpha ready for testing. This new release has a few features that I really like. The lack of those features gave me problems in the past. Because of that, I'm very excited waiting for the new stable release of PHP 5.4.

There's several features included in the release, but he spotlights some of the major ones - support for array dereferencing, indirect method calls through arrays, reintroduction of using "$this" in closures and traits support.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first PHP 5.4 alpha release. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Read the NEWS file for a complete list of changes. [...] This alpha release exists to encourage users to identify bugs, and to ensure that all new features and backward compatibility breaks are evaluated and documented before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Please report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

They remind the development community that this is an alpha release and is not meant to be used in production. Changes in this release include traits, array dereferencing, DTrace support, the removal of several ini options and a few session-related functions.

We're a bit further along now; and with the typehinting resolved (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.php.devel/62298/focus=62858) I want to start started with PHP 5.4 with the first alpha on Wednesday, November 24th. There are a few things that need sorting out and/or clarification: Annotations, Lemon rewrite, APC in trunk.

Keep in mind that this is only the very start of the process, so depending on any bumps along the way, PHP 5.4 may still be a bit out. Check the main PHP site for updates on betas and final releases as they become available.

I just released an Alpha version of PECL OCI8 1.4 on http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 The code is also merged to what will eventually be the PHP 5.3.2 and PHP 6.0 releases. Documentation will appear on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php in the next few days, if all goes according to plan.

Updates in this alpha release include a few new connection attribute functions, a change in the driver name for 11gRD2 connections and a correction of a bug in the oci_bind_by_name error handling.

The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I've been working on is finally out. Cairo is a 2D graphics library written in C with support for multiple output devices. The extension provides an Object Oriented API, but also includes procedural methods. This is similar to PHP's date and mysqli extensions

The extension (for PHP 5.2.x and 5.3.x versions) requires the CairoGraphics library to work but it allows you to create some great graphics and output them in a number of ways (like PDF, SVG and PostScript). The extension is still in the alpha stages because the API isn't quite complete, but you can still download this version if you'd like to give it a shot.

This is a question you should be asking the developers of the framework you are using. Same of course goes for any PHP application you care about. [...] We announce all PHP releases on this list (actually until now we have only announced RC's, but we are expanding this to also cover alpha and beta releases).

He suggests that subscribing to this list simplifies the process of keeping up with the latest releases of PHP and gives them a chance to report back with any issues they might find with them.

Every release runs the risk of BC breaks, intentional or not. Projects that want to make life easy for their users participate actively in the process of testing PHP releases. It makes the life of the PHP developers a lot easier .. and who doesn't want to make their life's easier?

As of late last night, you can now download (no SVN required) a tarball of a fully-operational Solar system with the 1.0.0alpha2 code in place: http://svn.solarphp.com/system/download/solar-system-1.0.0alpha2.tgz.

The three-step install instructions are also included - check out the download page for a quickstart guide on using this new code.