End Of Life For PHP 5.2, APC In PHP 5.4

Last week the PHP team released version 5.2.14 and with that came this:

This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

It's rather interesting in terms of timing. Drupal 7 will be out in the next few weeks and that is the first release to require PHP 5.2+. The folks over at Wordpress are just now starting talks about requiring PHP 5.2+.

Speaking of Drupal, in order to run PHP 5.3, you will need to make sure you are using Drupal 6.14 or above. Versions below that would die with some nasty little errors, and while Drupal will run on PHP 5.3, a lot of the contributed modules have yet to be updated to run on PHP 5.3.

PHP 6 Cancelled, PHP 5.4 Will Have APC Built In

Another big news story in the PHP world is the announcement that the PHP team has put off PHP 6 and instead are working towards PHP 5.4. This decision doesn't mean all the new features we wanted in PHP 6 are dead. Instead they are rolling some of those features into 5.4, and most notable, they will be bundling the highly popular APC caching engine with the release.

What really gets me excited about this news is that we may see better support for APC in projects like Drupal and Wordpress. Imagine not having to go through the hassle of installing and configuring another plugin, but rather just download and install your favorite CMS and get the benefits of APC's user cache right out of the box. Not only that, but having the op-code caching benefits "out of the box" will be a big boost to the PHP project as a whole.

So we have some really exciting times coming up and I can't wait to see where we are at in the next four years.