The PHP development group has officially released the latest alpha in the PHP 7.1.x series of releases. This is an alpha release and is not intended for production use.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Alpha 2. This is the second alpha release for PHP 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.

You can get this latest alpha release for testing on your own systems from the QA downloads page (for source) and the Windows QA site for the Windows binaries.

Davey Shafik has posted about some changes in engine exceptions in the latest alpha of PHP 7 (alpha2+), mainly a small change to how things are named.

While updating my PHP 7 talk “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: PHP 7″ for the DutchPHP Conference 2 weeks ago I noticed a small but significant change to the new Engine Exceptions feature in the newly release alpha 2. [...] However, for alpha2 this hierarchy changed. Engine Exceptions lost their “Exception” suffix, and became Error and and *Error exceptions, and the abstract BaseException class was changed to a Throwable interface.

He points out that this new naming and structure makes it impossible to make a good hierarchal structure for exceptions. He does favor the new format, though, as it does allow for some structure via interface definitions.

The second alpha (not for use in production) of the PHP 5.6.x series has been officially announced on the main PHP.net site today.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.0alpha2. This release adds new features and fixes bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system. [...] PHP 5.6.0alpha2 comes with a number of new features, including: peer certificates are now verified by default when connecting to SSL/TLS servers, an exponentiation operator has been added: **, and output encoding handling [that] has been simplified by using default_charset as the default character encoding.

If you're looking for more information about what's involved in migrating up to this version, check out the upgrade guide or for just the full list of change take a look at the NEWS file. You can download this alpha release from the PHP QA site (Windows binaries here).

As Lukas Smith mentions, the latest alpha release for the PHP 5.3 series has been released - PHP 5.3alpha2.

Wow, after what feels like ages PHP 5.3.0alpha3 was just released. Originally we hoped to be able to release now intermediate releases every 2-3 weeks, this one took a good 2 months. Somehow this releases did its very best to stall itself. People that needed to work on things together by chance ended up being busy with other things and vacations in just the right order to make things impossible. Most of this was to be attributed to the namespace discussions, which climaxed in the backslash FUD campaign.

He notes that a stable release is probably looking good in Q1 of 2009 (with namespaces being the delaying factor). He also suggests something that could help make things a bit simpler in the future - making the internals@ mailing list read-only for anyone outside of core developers. A good bit of the confusion and bickering came from those outside the dev team and it didn't help the group come to a decision any earlier.

You can find the official release information for the alpha2 on the main PHP.net website.

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