PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Bugfixes and updates in this release include the max_input_vars directive, an autoloading issue with is_a and changes to the FPM SAPI module. You can see the full list of changes here or just go over and download this latest release and get to installing - source, Windows binaries.

When I initially announced the Aura project, it was targeted at PHP 5.3. With a stable release of PHP 5.4 impending, we have moved the target to PHP 5.4. In addition, we have made 1.0.0-beta1 releases of almost all the component packages. (See an earlier announcement from Hari KT.)

The components include: a dependency injection container, an autoloader and a view system that are all self-contained with no other dependencies. You can find the complete code for these containers (and one for combining them all into a single system) on the project's github page.

Sometimes the most crucial, basic piece of information can seem so hard to find. For example, suppose you wanted to find out what version of PHP your remote webhost provides to shared hosting users? What would you do? [...] For development purposes it can be helpful having phpinfo() available, but on a live shared host, you may discover as I did recently that it is no longer available; your host may have disabled it.

She includes three other ways you can use to get the version of PHP you're working with:

• If you have command line access, running "php -v"
• Using the phpversion function (or PHP_VERSION constant)
• Appending a certain value to the URL (only works in some cases)

I've been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

The two he mentions deal with a new warning on illegal string offsets and the other about string offsets ("Notice: String offset cast occurred"). You can find out about more changes in the PHP 5.4 series in the various Changelogs for each Release Candidate and beta release.

The latest version of PHPUnit (3.6.4 at the time of this writing) does not play well with the Zend Framework extensions (Zend_Test_PHPUnit). After asking Matthew Weier O'Phinney about this he answered that they had standardized on PHPUnit-3.4 for ZF1. Having just upgraded to the latest version of PHPUnit on our servers we were no longer able to test our Zend Framework applications. One option was to downgrade PHPUnit, but since we were already using some of the new features this was not going to happen.

He method uses the "installroot" option that can be passed in to the PHPUnit installation process to point it to someplace other than the default PEAR install location. A small change is needed to the "phpunit" executable to have it correctly set the include path. Then it's just a matter of making a symlink to your "/usr/bin" directory pointing to the specific version.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the second release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0.

Fixes in this new version include updates to the built-in web server, PHP-FPM no longer being marked as experimental and changes to the Zend Engine, Core and various extensions. See the NEWS file for complete details. You can download this latest release from the downloads page (and here for Windows users).

For many of my projects (both hobby and commercial) I need to support many different PHP configurations. Not only just different PHP versions, but also debug builds, ZTS builds and 32-bit builds. In order to be able to test and build extensions against all those different PHP configurations I have adopted a simple method that I'm sharing with you here.

Using this script he can tell his system to pull the latest version of any release from SVN and try to compile it. The trick is putting each of them into a different directory under /usr/local. He uses another small shell function (with a function called "pe()") that sets up the pathing to the right release, complete with its own locations for PEAR/PECL and a php.ini.

In his mailing list post, David Soria Parra explains:

After 2 weeks of voting and discussion, I closed the votes today. The results are fairly straightforward. Most of the users want to move to a decentralized version control system. [...] I don't want to make a difference of who voted for what. I think the results are overwhelming in favor of Git.

He'll be working on the spec to make the move for the PHP source over to git and is planning a cut over some time in December. Stay tuned to the php.internals mailing list for more details about the move as they come up.

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge. By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system. It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

His post also includes some of the changes made in the latest release (0.1.0) and how you can clone the code from the SF.net repository.