Right from the birth of PHP in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP has seen many rejections and adoptions in its phases. As per the current technology survey conducted at W3techs this server side scripting language ( SSSL ) designed specifically for the web development purpose holds a significant amount of market usage.

Shown below is a survey snap from the w3tech showing the dominant hold of PHP in compared to other server side scripting languages.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a recursive acronym (A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands.). It’s a free software, released under the PHP licenses. Numerous versions of PHP has been released since its birth but currently the supported versions are three namely-

1. 5.3.24
2. 5.4.14
3. 5.5.0 (beta 4)

Out of the above three, 5.4.x version is the current rage in the web world. Letting alone the 5.5 version as it’s still a beta version.

Will there be any change in PayPlans 2.4 workflow ?

The fresh version of PHP 5.4.x has many new features as well as few backward incompatible changes.
PayPlans 2.4 beta has already mingled with all the new PHP features and has adopted two of the related backward incompatibility changes. I would like to point those two eminent to PayPlans. The removed dependencies are-

1. Pass by reference in function calling :
   

   Sample code: <?php $x = 1; swap(&$x); function swap($x) { $x = 2; } echo $x; ?>	Output in PHP 5.3.23   = 2
   	Output in PHP 5.4.13 <br /> <b>Fatal error</b>: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in <b>[...][...]</b> on line <b>2</b><br />

   
   As shown above this dependency is strictly removed in PHP 5.4.x. References were used to keep multiple copies of data structures intact, but added up to the complexity in coding for PHP. Now, this is an effort to increase the dynamicness of PHP coding. It will even allow the new adopters to code loosely at their ease. So, with all the versions of PHP used by our friends, PayPlans will also take care of PHP 5.4.x.
   
   
2. Array as string :
   

   Sample code: <?php     $x= array("hello"); echo $x;     ?>	Output in PHP 5.3.23 = Array
   	Output in PHP 5.4.13 <br /> <b>Notice</b>: Array to string conversion in <b>[...][...]</b> on line <b>3</b><br /> Array

   
   The usage of “Array as strings” has been deprecated too. The code snippet shown above tells us that this dependency works well in PHP 5.3.x. Well in 5.4.x it is still executed but with an error notice. So it’s not very big headache to panic for.
   
   

Payplans has always used the framework ideology in the lead role and has it’s own RB Framework. If ever a major change happens in future with any of the compatibilities, even in any of PayPlans version then the problem can always be sealed off and handled at Framework Level smartly, so any app or core code will never be affected.

PayPlans’ layered architecture gives you so much flexibility to adapt any change easily, as in past we have cope up with switching PayPlans from Joomla version 1.5 to 2.5 and then to 3.0 that’s the beauty of PayPlans.

Try PayPlans 2.4 BetaChange logs

Wrapping Up-

Didn’t feel like reading the whole article? Skipped down to here for some unknown reason? Here’s the quick version:

• PHP 5.4.x : Its the latest stable version used around. So, need to switch to it sooner or later.
• PayPlans’ future : This is one of the beta releases but, from now on PayPlans 2.4 & onward versions will be completely compatible to PHP 5.4x series.
• Earlier PHP versions fate : PayPlans 2.4 and onwards will also be supporting the earlier PHP version as usual. So, switch to new PHP at your convenience.
• PHP requirements for PayPlans 2.4 : Minimum version is 5.2.0 and recommended version is 5.2.9 or higher till 5.4.x.