PHP 6? Where is it?

[a_bertrand]

If any of you wonder where PHP 6 disappeared I shall here explain some of the issues / results:

Basically until march 2010 PHP developers where talking about PHP 6, which should improve the Object Oriented design as well as much better support for unicode (which is one of the mostly used way to support special characters like Chinese or even accents). In March 2010 the PHP development team simply saw that there was way too much work before reaching all those goals and decided to bring back most of the PHP 6 work to a version of PHP 5 which then become PHP 5.3.

PHP 5.3 introduced therefore breaking changes (which means that by default PHP doesn't work anymore as it was until this version), which means, if you have an host with PHP 5.1 or 5.2 and then try on PHP 5.3 you may have issues.

For the latest news, PHP 5.3.6 has been released last week which fixed a couple of bugs (more than 60) as well as improved a few things.

So when will we have PHP 6? Well overall there is no news about PHP 6 nor what it will introduce. Yet you should think about yourself, what would you really need out of PHP? What is still missing to the language? I would personally answer that beside a cleaner OO implementation, PHP should not be changed that much, and instead more work should be invested in some of the interesting frameworks.

Do you have opinions yourself? Then please share!

[Nickson]

Aha, good that you told us, I just checked and php6 is nowhere to be seen.

Overall I like php so much, just because by default it leaves you open to do everything you want wrong! This also gives you the benefit, aside from actually doing everything wrong, that you have a lot of ways to get to a desired result.

It was indeed announced that php5.3 would be a major change compared to php5.2. Whether this is good, or bad, I'll leave that in between. A fact is that a lot of OOP support was added, which is at the same time the problem of php to keep up with the more modern language that are built around OO or just provide it much more naturally. I believe php can never get up to par with current OO languages like Java or .net just by the way the platform works, and unless they change that, I don't see them closing the gap. But if php changes the core functionality and how things will work, it will lose all backwards compatibility, and I don't see that happen rather fast either. So a simple conclusion is that php will, most likely, have issues with proper OOP support for quite some time. I'm not saying that it won't work, because it really does.

Another thing I somewhat miss is a real runtime environment, like jre. It could also benefit applications largely, but that also comes with a price.

As on the topic of frameworks, no! I think the php-dev group should not keep themselves busy with frameworks, or at least not integrate them into php itself. Frameworks are great for RAD and such, but this is also one of the nice things of php. You can actually do with it what you want and you are not forced to use a framework without making it complex. Php is by default, very easy to use and it should stay like that.

[a_bertrand]

Never said the PHP Dev team should now work on frameworks. Simply I hardly see what could be implemented on the language without breaking it. Something I would not do either.

Also frameworks are not good only for RAD. Frameworks do allow to do more complex things while loosing less time.