The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today on the topic of installing both PHP4 and PHP5 at the same time (well, have them installed at the same time) on one Windows XP machine. The kicker is that it only uses one Apache 2 installation and runs on a single port. Interested?

One thing is sure, the fifth version of this great programming language is much better than all the previous ones, and sooner or later it will become ubiquitous. But what to do until then? Is it possible to have the 'best of both worlds'?

Is it possible to have the both versions of PHP installed on the same computer without conflicts, so one can maintain old PHP 4 projects, and develop new PHP 5 code? The answer is, yes.

The author (Slobodan Pavkov) steps you through his solution:

• how to prepare the machine for the installation and what you need to download
• how to get things installed and configured
• and a simple test to make sure things are in order

The key to the seperation is editing the hosts file on the machine and placing the files in different directories - one for PHP5 files and another for PHP4.