PHP 5.4 on Linux Shared Hosting

PHP 5.4

We are very happy to announce the availability of PHP 5.4 on Linux Shared Hosting. We have been optimising our PHP strategy on this platform behind the scenes for quite some time.   Concretely, we offer version 5.4.8, which is the latest release. It was launched on 18 October by the PHP development team. For further info, please visit http://www.php.net/archive/2012.php#id2012-10-18-1.   As the announcement indicates, a new version 5.3 is also available. We also installed this version so that customers can also use PHP 5.3.18.

Compatibility

We advise customers to try version 5.4 on recent code. Not only is this branch more stable and secure, but it is also much faster than the previous versions. Attention: with the launch of PHP 5.4, the community decided to permanently remove many deprecated features. On http://php.net/manual/en/migration54.php, you can find a migration guide that pays sufficient attention to new features and “backwards incompatible changes”.   If you discover that your code is not compatible with version 5.4, we strongly advise you to continue to use version 5.3. When we create hosting packages, we choose version 5.3 by default and things will remain this way for some time. As of next year, we hope to use PHP 5.4 as the standard version.

Features

PHP 5.4 offers some interesting features that you can find on http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration54.new-features.php. As you can see, the feature set is rather limited. The 2 most eye-catching features are:

• The availability of traits
• Support for short array syntax

Good to know

We will not offer the “built-in development web server in CLI mode”, because this web server was specifically designed to run tests, not to run in production environments.