Johannes Schlüter

hm, I haven't blogged for a while, and no, Twitter, which I still don't get, is not an excuse, maybe I don't like telling every tiny thing I do, maybe that's the reason I don't get twitter ... anyways: In roughly 10 hrs I'll leave to St. Augustin to attend FrOSCon and give a presentation about PHP 5.3. Pre-Registration is closed but tickets (5 Euro for two days of fun) can be bought right at the entrance.

As most of you might have seen we recently announced the first alpha of PHP 5.3.0. The major changes are listed in the announcement. Source tarballs can be found on PHP's downloads site, as it's the first release I packaged I'm especially interested in feedback, whether it works or not . But we didn't only have changes on the source builds: A new team took over the creation of Windows builds. As they also did a major update to the Windows build architecture (supporting newer compiler versions on Windows and added experimental support for 64bit platforms) the build process got a bit delayed but builds should be available soon.

Remember: It's a release we packaged to get feedback from our users. So please test it. If you find issues please report them - the sooner we know about issues the sooner they can be addressed. Although our test coverage increased we can't cover all cases in our tests so please test it now and don't wait for the stable release, once the stable release is out your edge case might trigger a bug on a productive system, bugs reported now can be fixed before we release a final version.

If you want to give back to the PHP project - hey you probably make a living out of software you get for free - and can't fix bugs or assist in a similar way you probably could help our documentation team with improving the documentation, there are a few features without proper documentation, yet.

Dmitry posted results of performance test comparing PHP 5.2 and 5.3 to internals which are impressive numbers:

• Drupal 20% faster
• Qdig 2% faster
• typo3 30% faster
• wordpress 15% faster
• xoops 10% faster

Up to 30% performance win by simply updating PHP! Please help us with the quality assurance and test your applications using a 5.3 snapshot - we can't cover every usecase, you can!

And again as a sidenote: 5.2.6RC2 is out, please test that, too

Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.

Currently we have the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 out. Test it now with your code! We do our best to test it but we can't cover every use case so we need your testing! The simple rule is: Who doesn't test in time shouldn't complain later if their application breaks. 5.2.6 shouldn't brake anything but sometimes there are unexpected side-effects. Now we can fix them, it's harder after the release.

For 5.3 things are different. We are going to break stuff, but only with good intentions. The latest break we did is dropping the zend.ze1_compatibility_mode ini setting. That setting was broken from day one and gave lots of confusion. So test your applications in time and report unintended breaks you discover.

Of course you should always test the latest snapshots while doing your development but a few more free days might simply give you more time and a chance to give something back to the PHP project. For supporting PHP you might also read about the upcoming PHP TestFest and GSoC.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

There are quite a few new features already committed to the CVS tree, some of them are documented in the NEWS file and READMEs in CVS, most of them have been commented on Planet PHP so I suggest searching there for more information and keep this list short:

• Namespaces: A way to help you organizing your code.
• Late Static Binding: Gives you the class name used when calling a static method.
• Dynamic static calls: $c = "classname"; $c::someMetod();
• Improved ini-handling: .htaccess file like per-directory configuration and much more
• __callStatic magic method: similar to __call but for static calls
• mysqlnd: a replacement for libmysql for better PHP-MySQL-Integration
• getopt() on any platform (inclding windows)
• ...

As you can see there's lots of stuff which needs testing! The earlier bugs are found the earlier they can be fixed! In case you ever wondered how you could give back something to PHP (which you certainly should do) you might take a look at our test coverage reports to see which areas of PHP need more testing and provide additional tests. (See qa.php.net and Marcus's slides for an introduction to test writing) Having more tests is important for us - and you don't have to know much about PHP internals to write proper tests (sometimes it's even better to write black-box tests...)

But well, there's not only PHP 5.3: If you're interested in unicode you should certainly take a look at PHP 6 and if you're running older systems you should consider upgrading to the latest 5.2 release instead of waiting for PHP 5.3 - the stable release is not expected within this year and many things there can change till it's released.

And as a final note: Test the snaps as often as you can - generic tests can never cover all use-cases and - as said above - fixing regressions is harder after a release than during development. (And be warned: We won't take any complaints from people not testing in time)