The future of PHP

Now that you have finished learning all about PHP 5, you're probably wondering what the development group can do next - where is PHP headed in the next six months, one year, or even three years?

PHP 5 has been a very significant release for the language - it has formalised a lot of the features that before had only a little support, or were perhaps ill-defined. As a major version, PHP 5 is likely to continue being supported for three or four more years before PHP 7 takes over - PHP 4 was officially released on 22nd May 2000 and went through many revisions before being replaced by PHP 5 over four years later.

When it comes to what will be in PHP 7, who knows? The main changes that we're pretty much guaranteed to get are support for Unicode (at last!), but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine, for now at least. If you were wondering, the next release is called PHP 7 and not PHP 6 for historical reasons: there was a huge development effort behind making PHP 6 some years ago, and it ultimately failed. To avoid confusing matters, the developers aren't using that name again, and are jumping straight to PHP 7.

In the meantime, be happy that you have chosen such a popular language that is advancing so quickly - PHP is here to stay, and things are only going to get better!

Chapter contents

  1. 25.1. Helping out PHP development
  2. 25.2. Choosing a web host
    1. 25.2.1. Does your web host support PHP?
  3. 25.3. Optimisation summary

Want to learn PHP 7?

Hacking with PHP has been fully updated for PHP 7, and is now available as a downloadable PDF. Get over 1200 pages of hands-on PHP learning today!

If this was helpful, please take a moment to tell others about Hacking with PHP by tweeting about it!

Next chapter: Helping out PHP development >>

Previous chapter: Answers to Chapter 19

Jump to:

 

Home: Table of Contents

Copyright ©2015 Paul Hudson. Follow me: @twostraws.