Why have the PHP teams got three different stable versions of PHP on the go? These are: 5.6, 5.5, 5.4, and they've just recently released version 7 alpha.
Could someone enlighten me as to why the PHP group decided that three different stable versions of PHP is good idea? And might I assume that I best just jump straight into 5.7 and clean up my code?
I don't think my requirements are exotic - I don't crunch data, I just use PHP validated data to read/write to MySQL - no rocket science.
The issue? My old WAMP Zend v6 Community Edition run's PHP 5.5.7 and my new AWS micro machine uses 5.3.29 (build date May 2015 but amazingly, AWS have standardized on the pre-historic 5.3). I discovered a bug with json_encode(). When I realised I have two different versions of PHP, I'm thinking its best I just upgrade both to similar versions. Hence I am thinking 5.7 is probably my best bet for future support. Comments welcome.
The older versions are less supported than the newer versions however the older versions exist because of their popularity within present day production.