State of PHP 5.3 on Windows

Posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago at 19:51. 1 comment

While developing our last project, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade to PHP 5.3. I’ve been running it for a year now on my home FreeBSD desktop, while it was still in development, and everything was humming  along flawlessly.

So what happened after I installed PHP 5.3 on my Windows development machine? Good things. I noticed a speed increase, and I found a few Magento incompatibilities which I fixed for the future. I was about to forget PHP 5.2 and embrace PHP 5.3′s new functionality, among them closures and the new MySQL Native Driver.

Next was installing APC. I couldn’t get it to work, so I browsed over to pecl4win to grab an up-to-date binary. As you can see, that endeavor ended rather fruitless. After trying every combination of VC6/VC9/TS/NTS binaries, I gave up. Summary: APC for PHP 5.3 doesn’t work on Windows with Apache.

Then I started debugging. And it didn’t work. My PHP IDE/debugger, PHPEdit, timed out trying to read the value of any variables. That was a major show stopper, so I wasted the better half of an afternoon reverting everything to PHP 5.2.11.

All in all, I lost a full day to this experiment. Wouldn’t be so bad if I had not been in dire crunch time already, trying to get the shop out in time.