Terry Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 This maybe a dense question but the majority of hosts don't offer version 6 as of now, March 2011, my host has most of it's servers still on 5.2.9 and many others are using 5.3.2 to 5.3.4. If this is going to be like adoption from version 4 to 5 we have another 3 to 4 years yet before 6 becomes main stream, unless I am missing something. I am just now learning 5.2.x variant and later will be focusing on 5.3.x+ specific stuff. I remember when 6 was released and that was several years ago so I guess it will be very mature when everyone starts adopting as mainstream version. Am I missing something or am I completely behind this stuff and don't even know how far behind I am? I know it's off topic but I have been wondering about this for sometime and you seem to be the person to ask, Larry. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Hey Terry, I posted this on my blog and in the newsletter and on Amazon as it's complicated and a bit embarrassing. PHP 6 never existed, officially. When I wrote the book, PHP 6 was about halfway done, so I used the beta version of PHP 6 in writing the book. The main feature of PHP 6 that I wanted to highlight was support for Unicode, which is pretty important in a global sense. But since the book was written, changes took place and it turned out that it got to be very complicated to continue PHP 6 as they were planning. So PHP 6 was shelved. Some of its features made their way into PHP 5.3, including most of the PHP 6 stuff that I discussed in the book (which is only about 5% of the book's material). I don't even know if there's a plan for PHP 6 now. Ironically, I tried to incorporate PHP 6 discussion into the book so that the book wouldn't be outdated too quickly after being published. Instead, three years later (I think), the book is still too far ahead! And, doubly ironically, the PHP 6 stuff was really hard to write as there was barely any decent documentation on it. Often I had to look into PHP's core code to figure out what functions existed and how they were used. As I said, I'm a little embarrassed about that, but I've learned a valuable lesson: not to go too far out on a limb! So the short answer of "Why learn PHP 6?" isn't you shouldn't because it doesn't exist! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Posted March 30, 2011 Author Share Posted March 30, 2011 That's actually an awesome story. LOL Since 6 doesn't officially exist then I guess this isn't really off topic. I just got an email about an upcoming feature in 5.3.6, apparently it will have a built-in webserver so people don't need to install apache for their testing environments to run PHP. Just saw that today and have not looked into that any further. That actually sounds pretty cool. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Live and learn, eh? Not so sure about 5.3.6 and a built-in Web server. The idea itself kind of surprised me when you mentioned it, and in doing research, there's nothing about that in the release notes for PHP 5.3.6, and the only place I find any mention of the idea is in association with a guy that I consider to be a crackpot. So... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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