Joe Ferguson has a new post to his site showing you how to install PHP 7.1 on a Cloud9 workspace to get the latest features of PHP (they run PHP 5.5 by default).

July 8th I’m giving a general PHP training day at the Fedex Institute of Technology and because I’m targeting absolute beginners I wanted to use Cloud 9. Cloud 9 is an online editor that gives you a full linux workspace to build your project in. The first thing I noticed was the container Cloud 9 provides is running PHP 5.5.

He provides the contents of the bash script you can run via the Cloud9 interface that will install PHP 7.1 and several dependencies. It also updates a few configurations to work with PHP 7.1 and restarts the Apache instance to have it all take effect. He's posted this as a repository on GitHub to make it even easier and shows how to set up the Cloud9 workspace using it as a base.

James Fuller has posted a review of the online code editing tool Cloud9 and how well it works for his PHP development.

At first I though Cloud9 would be a simple editor, perhaps a nice showcase of what you can do with HTML5 and some well-written javascript but it quickly became evident that this app was packing a lot of powerful features. [...] Sounds pretty awesome if you think about it. You can even connect you own server via SSH instead of using the build in sandbox (this is a paid feature). Is this the Holy-Grail? Not Really, but it’s close. This is a very exciting product that almost reaches holy-grail status, but it falls short in a few key areas.

He includes a little bit about trying to use PHP 5.5 in the Cloud9 editing, and points out that while he was (eventually) able to get the PHP 5.5 alpha compiled, he wasn't able to get things like memcache compiled and working.

The Cloud9 team has done a great job removing the barriers to getting a simple idea out the door. I implemented FizzBuzz in PHP using Composer, PHPUnit, and some SPL interfaces and got it all done , and posted to GitHub in about an hour.