Though a lot of we are not yet getting a hang of PHP5, news around PHP6 is on the way. Hell i recall a lot of hosting company just recently upgraded their PHP to version 5. Seems like version 5’s improved class handling just came out yesterday, time really does fly. PHP’s upcoming edition, V6, includes new kick ass features and most awaited syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

Though judging by the snapshots of the new addition, this will be a pretty moderate upgrade. Version 6 adds built-in tools for working with XML and SOAP, support for creating custom namespaces for methods and classes. Apart from addition of new features, there will be some dumping scenario as well on version 6. Version 6 will ditch several infamous features that have caused problem in the past, like safe_mode, register_globals, and magic_quotes. I am sure I won’t miss them J So if I were you and have some coding using those ugly stuffs, I would have update my code to work without them. Oh two more, keep your eyes peeled for "continue" and "break" operators with non-constant operands.

Another need to mentioned thing is the shorter version of the PHP tags (

) won’t be supported on PHP6 as well as libraries like FreeType 1 and GD 1 will be obsolete.

Some of the features of upcoming version 6 have also been ported to PHP V5.3, which is scheduled to be released during the first quarter of 2008. You may want to upgrade to V5.3 and start using these features now, so that when you move to V6 of PHP, it’ll be less of a jump.

PHP is one of the most server side scripting language on the face of the planet, well at least on the web space planet: D. But PHP always lacked broader set of characters for international support. That’s one of the biggest reason developer’s forced to choose different language, such as the Java™ programming language for development, because it has better internationalizations (i18n) support than PHP. Perhaps version 6 appearances will be time to take another look at PHP when the support improves.

Are you ready for PHP V6? If you were upgrading tomorrow, would your scripts execute just fine or would you have work to do? Why wait go grab a development build from snaps.php.net and try it out.