About two months ago, Johannes Schlüter posted about the Future of PHP 6. Schlüter works for MySQL (and therefore Oracle-Sun) and is an active and involved member of the PHP team. In his post, Schlüter discusses the difficult choices facing PHP with respect to the intended version 6 and its support for Unicode. In turns out that changing all of PHP to support Unicode isn’t as easy as one would have thought. And, of course, it was originally considered to be, well, hard. Apparently, this struggle is the reason PHP 6 is still nowhere to be found (in fact, the source code has slowly been disappearing from PHP’s snaps site). So now, the PHP team is regrouping in order to go forward and we’re not exactly sure when or how Unicode support will be integrated into PHP, or how this change affects the next few versions of PHP, both minor (i.e., 5.3) and major (6 and 7).
As a person that wrote a book on PHP 6 quite some time ago, and has looked more and more silly over time, I’m happy to hear this news, even if we don’t yet know what the end result will be. Granted, most of that book uses PHP 5 and PHP 6 (the version that was available when I wrote it) is only required by like 5-10% of the material, but still…lesson learned on my part: especially when it comes to open source software, there’s just no predicting what’s going to happen next. So, for the time being, let’s be happy with the PHP we have and keep an eye on where the development team goes with this. I know I sure will!
The way it looks to me, PHP may never release an official version 6 and may skip to number 7. The PHP language needs books to teach folks who are starting out in PHP. To avoid confusion in the future, PHP will probably skip ahead to version 7 so that folks who are looking for books on PHP will not be confused by books written for an older, never released version of PHP.
And we all know that when PHP 7 is on the horizon, books will come out before PHP 7 is finally released. It will be necessary to get in the PHP 7 game early to avoid being lost in the crowd later on. It’s therefore very important that the PHP developers have a very solid plan for PHP 7 and that they stick to it.
Basically, I’m saying that in my humble opinion, the egg is laying more on the face of the PHP developers for not getting PHP 6 released, than on the authors and publishers that put out books for PHP 6 before it was released.
Cheers
Thanks for your input on this. I think I’m still going to be extremely careful about what version I use in the future. It’s important that computer books are current, however, I know many Web hosts still aren’t offering PHP 5! I agree that it’d make sense to go to PHP 7. Wouldn’t be the first technology to skip a major release version.
I would do the same if I were an author as well.
I’ve just bought your book and am a newbie to PHP realistically should I buy something else, I’d appreciate an email if you don’t want to publicly say yes.
Thanks for your question. I can, in good conscience, say there’s no problem using the book whatsoever. Only a small chunk of the book, like 5-10% relied upon PHP 6 when I was writing it. And some of that information has since been incorporated into PHP 5. And even the specific functions you can’t use (and there aren’t many) still give you a sense of theory. So, not a problem at all. Thanks for asking, though, and for the interest in the book.