PHP 5.3

When is DreamHost going to be upgrading to PHP 5.3? I've been waiting to use late static binding for years now...

We're planning to upgrade to 5.3 as soon as we can - some of the new features sound really exciting. (The one I'm really looking forward to is .phprc customization. No more crazy workarounds for custom php.ini settings!)

We're just waiting on a few extensions to release 5.3-compatible versions first. The main one we're still waiting for at this point is XCache.

Great, thanks for the update. Looks like XCache has a 5.3-compatible RC out today. Hopefully this means you guys can do the update soon.

Do post on status.dreamhost when you make the update, if you would. Thanks!

Yep! Hopefully a final release isn't far behind the RC -- we'd prefer to not use prerelease software unless we absolutely have to. :) And yes, we'll definitely stick something up on the status page before (as well as after!) we make a major upgrade like this one.

The full release of xDebug have now been out for about a month. Is PHP 5.3 coming soon or what is Dreamhost currently waiting on?

You can compile it yourself if you're in a rush to use PHP 5.3, then switch to the DreamHost version once they've implemented it across the board.




How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

We're still waiting on a few frequently requested PHP extensions, including the Ioncube loader.

Any news on this? I've stated a new open source project that will run only in PHP 5.3 and would like to point users to use dreamhost for hosting it.

IonCube is still dragging their heels on PHP 5.3 support:

http://forum.ioncube.com/viewtopic.php?t=2743

If this takes too much longer, we may end up moving to 5.3 anyway and leaving a copy of the 5.2 CGI around for IonCube users. However, for the time being we'd like to avoid breaking things too badly for our customers who are using IonCube-encrypted scripts.

I hope Dreamhost will decide what to do: either update to 5.3.x either at least update to latest 5.2.11. On many servers we have 5.2.6 and the last one, with various bug and security fixes is 5.2.11. I obviously really hope for 5.3 since the major important additions.

andrewf, it looks as though even if you want, there's a possibility that the new IonCube users would still have to get a re-encoded version of their product to use it with PHP 5.3?

http://forum.ioncube.com/viewtopic.php?t=1856

They've "worked hard" to keep backwards compatibility (as of the latest post on Oct. 3rd), but there seems to be no guarantees.

I'm glad you're also excited about PHP 5.3. ;) Lambda functions in PHP will be so nice in certain circumstances.

They say, "Practice makes perfect," yet they also say, "Nobody's perfect". I don't get it.

Wow, it's taken them long enough -- four months?! From what I'm reading into their announcement, though, it sounds as the new decoder will be able to read scripts encoded for older versions of Ioncube, so at least that should work.

At least that means we're just waiting for a final release of Ioncube, then. Once that's ready, there's nothing left keeping us from upgrading.

(Personally, what I'm most excited about is PHP 5.3's support for .user.ini files. They're like .htaccess files, except for PHP configuration. Having these available will mean that 99% of customers who are currently using custom PHP setups won't need to anymore.)