It’s time to upgrade your PHP! If it seems like you just heard this from us, you’re not wrong.
By gradually deprecating features and techniques that no longer represent best practices, PHP nudges developers to keep their applications current, ready to address new business needs.
That’s why the PHP committee recently announced PHP 8.2 and froze PHP 7.4. Even PHP 8.0 now receives only security fixes until it enters end-of-life on November 26, 2023.
If you’re feeling helplessly behind, you can relax. Our support team knows how to ease the transition from PHP 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1—and yes, even PHP 5.x! We can help get you back on track for smaller, easy-to-manage PHP upgrades. And if you opt for SmartSupport, we will walk you through regular PHP tune-ups, making your next upgrade that much easier.
So yes, it’s time to upgrade your PHP! Let’s put the legacy of technical debt behind us.
PHP 8.2 Now Available in Seiden CP+ PHP
As part of our commitment to keep PHP applications on IBM i up-to-date, we released our CommunityPlus+ PHP 8.2 for IBM i on December 8, 2022, the day the PHP community announced general availability.
Key changes are highlighted below. For details on PHP 8.2 features, we recommend this coverage by PHP.Watch.
New Features in PHP 8.2
Improvements to ODBC connection string handling (submitted by our own Calvin Buckley)
Readonly Classes: PHP 8.2 builds on PHP 8.1’s ability to declare readonly for class properties to let you declare an entire class as readonly
Allow null, false, and true as stand-alone types
New “Random” extension
Deprecated Features
Dynamic Properties
utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() Functions
Mbstring: Base64, Uuencode, QPrint, and HTML Entity Encodings
${var} String Interpolation
Installing/Upgrading PHP 8.2 on IBM i
While PHP.net offers migration guides, they are not IBM i-specific. Contact us if you’d like our advice on upgrading PHP for use with IBM i applications.
