PHP: Three Versions, One Promise, eBay Bullish on PHP 6's Use of Unicode

[mandy]

PHP  has long been a favorite dynamic programming language for Web developers. After 10 years of growth, 2006 looks to be a banner year for the open source language as its collaboration framework, partner ecosystem and the language itself are expected to grow and gain new users.

Look for a confluence of three distinct branches of the PHP language, with versions 4, 5 and 6 all likely to be out in the market in 2006...

PHP 6 is likely to come out in 2006 with some important innovations. Perhaps the most important new feature is Unicode, an encoding scheme that allows for virtually all major world languages to be encoded into a single character set.

Ebay is bullish on PHP's embrace of Unicode. Trachtenberg said it would make it easier for developers to communicate with anyone across eBay's sites...

full article: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/art...hp/3573486

[rose]

with versions 4, 5 and 6 all likely to be out in the market in 2006...

3 versions at once.  What fun.  :blinkie:

PHP is actually the most popular Apache Web server module, with some 44 percent of all surveyed servers running it. By contrast, Perl, another popular open source language, comes in at 11 percent.

Its surprising only 44% run it.  No surprise perl is 11%.

[bargainbloodhound]

3 versions at once.  What fun. 

 

Fun isn't the word I would have chosen.  Nightmare is more like it.  Especially when you consider that perl 6 will be out next year: 2 perls and 3 phps. I'm already having to juggle things around to get all of our programs to run because we have a bunch of php4 (and one php3 program :blinkie: ) that will not run under php5 so we had to keep one server running php4 when we switched the others to php5 this year.  A large percentage of the perl programs we're using are 5-7 years old and I know most of them won't work with perl 6.   Nightmare.