On June 20th 2013, the PHP group has released the first stable version of PHP 5.5.

The key features of PHP 5.5.0 include:

Added generators and coroutines.

Added “finally” keyword.

Added simplified password hashing API.

Added support for constant array/string dereferencing.

Added Class Name Resolution As Scalar Via “class” Keyword

Added support for using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions

Added support for non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach

Added support for list in foreach

Added Zend Opcache extension and enable building it by default.

The GD library has been upgraded to version 2.1 adding new functions and improve existing functionality.

A lot more improvements and fixes

Changes that affect compatibility:

PHP logo GUIDs have been removed

Windows XP and 2003 support dropped

Case insensitivity is no longer locale specific. All case insensitive matching for function, class and constant names is now performed in a locale independent manner according to ASCII rules

I’m proud to announce that the corresponding packages are now available on Dotdeb for Debian 7.0 “Wheezy”, on both amd64 and i386 architectures.

To upgrade your Wheezy boxes to PHP 5.5.0, just add these two lines to your sources.list :

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all

Please note that :

php5-apc is not available for PHP 5.5 yet. Instead, PHP OPcache (the open-sourced Zend Optimizer+) has been included and activated by default in php5-common . And if you need a user cache, please install php5-apcu .

is not available for PHP 5.5 yet. Instead, PHP OPcache (the open-sourced Zend Optimizer+) has been included and activated by default in . And if you need a user cache, please install . php5-xcache is missing too. Don’t upgrade if you need it.

is missing too. Don’t upgrade if you need it. PHP 5.4 will still be considered as default branch on Debian 7.0

PHP 5.5 won’t be packaged for Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”. Upgrade to Wheezy instead.

Please read the Changelog and the migration guide (be aware of the backward incompatible changes) before upgrading.

Last but not least, if you like Dotdeb, feel free to show your support.