PHP is a well known general purpose, server side web scripting language. A vast majority of online websites are coded in this language. PHP is ever evolving, feature rich, easy to use and well organized scripting language. Currently PHP development team is working on next major release of PHP, named PHP 7. The current production PHP version is PHP 5.6, as you might already know that PHP 6 was aborted in the past, the supporters of PHP 7 did not want the next important PHP version to be confused with that branch that was killed long time in the past. So it has been decided to name the next major release of PHP as PHP 7 instead of 6. PHP 7.0 is supposed to be released in November this year.
Here are some of the prominent features in next major PHP release.
- In order to improve performance and memory footprints PHPNG feature has been added to this new release.
- JIT engine has been included to dynamically compile Zend opcodes into native machine code in order to achieve faster processing. This feature will allow subsequent calls to the same code so that it may run much faster.
- AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) is a newly added feature which will enhance support for php extensions and userland applications.
- Asynchronous Programming feature will add support for parallel tasks within the same request.
- New version will support for stand alone multi-threading web server so that it may handle many simultaneous requests using a single memory pool.
### Installing PHP 7 on Centos / Fedora ###
Lets see how we can install PHP7 on Centos 7 and Fedora 21. In order to install PHP7 we will need to first clone php-src repository. Once cloning process is complete, we will configure and compile it. Before we proceed, lets ensure that we do have followings installed on our Linux system otherwise PHP compile process will return errors and abort.
- Git
- autoconf
- gcc
- bison
All of the above metioned prerequisits can be installed using Yum package manager. The following single command should take care of this:
yum install git autoconf gcc bison
Ready to start PHP7 installation process ? Lets first create PHP7 directory and make it your working directory.
mkdir php7
cd php7
Now clone php-src repo, run following command on the terminal.
Conguratulaion, PHP 7 has been installed on your Linux system now. Once installation is complete, move to sapi/cli direcoty inside php7 installation folder.
PHP 7 is also [added in remi repositories][1], this upcoming version is mainly focused on performance improvements, its new features are aimed to make PHP as a well fit for modern programming needs and trends. PHP 7.0 will have many new features and some deprecations to the old items. We hope to see details about new features and deprecations in the coming months. Enjoy!
