Zeev on PHP

As far as I have seen, a two part interview the German online portal Golem conducted with Zeev Suraski in Mid-October went quite unnoticed in the non-German speaking community, so I thought that I would sum up the most important topics he covered (translation errors are all mine; I also tried to maintain the context of what Zeev said, but you never now):

• Zend Studio will continue to exist, even though the Eclipse PDT have been published. A new Zend Studio version should be available in the foreseeable future. Should time tell that everybody migrates over the Eclipse, Zend Studio may be superseded.
• [On PHP 6 migration:] Incompatibilities between PHP 5 and PHP 6 may be more severe than they were between PHP 4 and PHP 5. Everything possible is done to make the migration from 5 to 6 as seamless as possible.
• It will take at least one year until PHP 6 will be there.
• APC may be part of PHP 6, but there will also be a commercial Zend product.
• [On new features in PHP 6:] Unicode an PHP setup changes (referring to register_globals etc.). Most other new functionality may also come with PHP 5.3 or 5.4.
• Five or six developers work full-time on the Zend Framework.
• Zend plans to publish tools to facilitate and speed up development of Ajax applications with PHP [something I have been complaining about since years ;-)]

Some interesting points here. Thoughts/comments?