Lorna Mitchell has a post to her site showing you how to get a PHP7 setup and working so you can test out your current application, preparing it for this next major version's release.

PHP 7 is coming, which is nice, but what does it mean for the majority of PHP developers? PHP as a community is notoriously slow in adoption, some of us are still waiting for 2012's new shiny to be available as standard on our hosting platforms. However with the performance benefits and a few really nice new features, PHP 7 is well worth everyone's attention, and it's actually quite easy to get started so here's my quick howto.

The large part of the post is the steps you'll need to get the php7dev box (from Rasmus Lerdorf) up and running, complete with a shared folder mounted from your local machine and a custom Nginx configuration. She also mentions the "Go PHP7" initiative that's aiming to help make the transition to PHP7 as easy as possible for everyone (including various extensions).

Rob Allen has a new post to his site showing the results of some testing he did when running a Zend Framework v1 application on PHP 7.

Zend Framework 1 is still actively maintained and we fully intend to ensure that ZF1 works with no problems on PHP 7 when its released. Now that PHP 7.0.0 Alpha 1 has been released, it's time to find out if your Zend Framework 1 app works with it. The easiest way to do this is to use a virtual machine. My preference is Vagrant with Rasmus' PHP7dev box.

He walks through the setup of the virtual machine via a simple Vagrantfile, configuring the latest PHP 7 version, an Nginx server and a basic database. Fortunately, his results turned out quite well with only one issue identified in his application (one with method names the same as class names). You can use this as a a guide to try out your own applications too. Be sure to check the UPGRADING file for a list ot possible breaks to help you track down issues you might be seeing.