Over the weekend I spent sometime testing PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 builds trying to get them to work on wampserver. I was disappointed at every turn. It appears that PHP 5.3 alpha and PHP 6 dev are not quite ready for windows users.

Wampserver

One of the little known secrets of wampserver is that it is very easy to run multiple versions of PHP and installation is a snap. You only have to download one of the finished packages of PHP to use as a kick starter for the program. This is because after doing a manual install of PHP the software does not automatically pick up and show the package in the switcher. If you use the installer it sets up a minimal of two PHP versions to switch between. Any manual installs after this are shown.

Can I manually add a release of Apache, PHP or MySQL?
Yes and here's how. Download your favorite relerase on its official site, and put it in the bin directory of WampServer.
For Apache and MySQL, just add a wampserver.conf file inside the release's directory.
See the files delivered wih WampServer tocreate your own wampserver.conf file.
For PHP, also add a php.ini file (used in CLI if necessary) and a phpForApache.ini file (used by Apache) and that's it.

PHP 5.3

After installing the latest version of PHP 5.3 I thought that I would up and running and be able to test all the new OOP goodies. Unfortunately the MySQL dlls refused to load. They are present and the php.ini is correct but PHP.exe cannot see them. I was dead in the water. The same thing happens with each and every windows release. So I guess it's another month or two wait until this is ready.

PHP 6

Now since PHP 5.3 could not be very far from PHP 6 I decided to try it instead. I was greeted by several crashes of Apache and a couple of instances where Firefox just collapsed. Fortunately there was hope. Wampserver techs released a PHP 6 package. This worked right away. So although the latest releases of PHP 6 do not work with wampserver at least there is one available so that windows users can play with PHP 6.

I still find it very disapppointing though that windows binaries of PHP are always so unstable and the last things done. Web developers that use windows don't do it because they don't like Linux or FreeBSD they are on windows because it provides the environment that is needed for their work. They should not be penalized for this and the PHP project should do more to see that windows gets just as much attention as the *nix versions of PHP.

Happy Publishing!

Pia Weathers - database systems engineer