Stuart Hebert of the Gentoo blog has posted this new item as a reminder to all of those naysayers out there that didn't think it could be done that PHP4 and PHP5 can live together happily on the same box.

Today has served as a timely reminder to me that not everyone understands that it's perfectly possible to have both PHP4 and PHP5 installed in Apache at the same time. A lot of folks just stop when they learn that you can't load mod_php4 and mod_php5 at the same time into Apache. There's no solution in the excellent PHP Manual that I could spot this afternoon (maybe I've just missed it?), and a lot of folks just don't get any further along than that.

As an illustration of its possiblity, he points to this article from Andreas Korthaus showing how it's done under various different types of installs (Apache/CGI, Aapche/suphp).

Sebastian Bergmann has updated a previous benchmark concerning the performance of PHP 5.1 as built with various versions of GCC.

I updated my previous benchmark of PHP 5.1. This time around I built PHP with GCC 3.4.5, GCC 4.0.2, and GCC 4.1.0.

The bottom line result seems to be that GCC 4 generates slightly slower code:

• GCC 3.4.5: 15.223
• GCC 4.0.2: 17.896
• GCC 4.1.0: 17.847

When I have more time, I will investigate this further using alternative optimizations, including profiling-guided ones.

The detailed results are also included, showing how he came to each point mentioned above. They include the specs for the machine, how the testing was set up, and the detailed breakdown of the stats for each GCC version.

In this new article from InternetNews.com, there's a look back at where PHP has come from as well as a look forward to the new year and what we can expect.

PHP has long been a favorite dynamic programming language for Web developers. After 10 years of growth, 2006 looks to be a banner year for the open source language as its collaboration framework, partner ecosystem and the language itself are expected to grow and gain new users.

Look for a confluence of three distinct branches of the PHP language, with versions 4, 5 and 6 all likely to be out in the market in 2006. It will also be a year in which PHP will continue to challenge .NET and Java as the online language of choice for developers.

They also look at a brief history of PHP, what PHP6 has in store for the community, the confusion that the "three versions" (PHP 4.x, 5, and the upcoming 6) can cause. They wrap it all up with a positive note about PHP and its future from Andi Gutmans of Zend.

In a pointer from this post on Nexen.net today, there's a look at a new post on Ernies Weblog concerning the use of multiple versions of PHP with Apache on Windows.

I had occasion to set up a dev box to test a couple of web apps against different php versions, so I thought I would share the steps. I have documented for 2 versions, but more can be done if required. This was done using Apache2 on Windows.

His process involves the installation of Apache first, then each of the PHP versions in seperate locations (to keep things clean). From there's it's a matter of creating two different services, one for each version og PHP. Then, whenever you need it, you can just fire up the appropriate version...