It's Now Easier To Try PHP 7 On Fedora & RHEL

For those interested in PHP 7, it's now easier to try out the development version of the next-generation PHP on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux based operating systems.

It's already easy to build PHP (7) on most any supported platform, but for those interested in RPMs and Yum'ing, there's now pre-built packages of PHP7 in its current development state. Remi Collet who often handles the PHP packages for Fedora, has put out an experimental package collection containing the early PHP7 packages.

Remi's PHP 7.0 packages are initially targeting Fedora 20, 21, and 22 along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6/7 (including RHEL offspring like CentOS and Scientific). There's a php70 software collection as part of the remi repository for trying out the new PHP.

Those interested in trying out these pre-built PHP 7.0 packages can find more details on Remi's blog.

PHP 7.0 is expected to be officially released in late 2015. PHP 7 is much faster than PHP 5.x and adds support for return type declarations, improved variable syntax, the null coalesce operator was finally added, scalar type declarations, and various other language additions on top of Zend Engine 3.