Shopware is one of the first shop systems to be compatible with PHP 7

Schöppingen, Germany 7th December 2015 – After a decade in development, the latest version of the popular programming language, PHP, was finally released last Thursday. Shopware is one of the first PHP-based shop systems to be compatible with this major release – a compatibility that has been ready for the update since Shopware 5.1 was released in September. This benefits not only developers, but those who are using the online shops themselves.

“The greatest advantage with Shopware’s compatibility with PHP 7 is the performance increase. Our performance tests show Shopware is now twice as fast in some areas. This can be specially seen in the Theme Cache, where it takes PHP 7 around 2 seconds to compile a theme. With the earlier version of PHP 5.6, the same process took about 5 seconds. Other processes returned a 25-30% increase in performance,” said Stefan Hamann, CEO and Director of Development at Shopware.

Over the course of 10 years, nearly 10,000 changes were made between PHP 5 and PHP 7. Many tried in vain to push version 6, but to avoid any confusions,PHP simply skipped this version. According to the manufacturer, PHP 7 is 14x faster than its previous version. To name a new improvements, there is a consistent 64-bit support, anonymous classes and a heavily reworked ZEND engine.

The calendar of events also played an important role for Shopware. “As one of leads in innovation in German eCommerce, it’s very important that we always bring the latest technologies into our system. This gives our customers a high degree of security and allows us to quickly adapt to our system to the latest standards,” Stefan Hamann said.