VAT Validation now for PHP 7.1+

When I started my European Commission (EC) VAT Information Exchange System (VIES) project back in 2011, PHP 5.3 was the current version that has given us so much. Earlier that year version 5.2 was announced End-of-Life and everyone was excited about the new features in PHP coming with the 5.3.x releases.

But fast-forwarding to today, PHP 7.1 is the latest stable release and PHP 5.6 only gets security fixes until the end of this year. In the mean time several open-source projects like PHPUnit, XDebug, Zend Framework, Laravel, Joomla, TYPO3, Magento and Symfony announced they stop development for PHP 5 versions and now only move forward with PHP 7.1 and higher.

After seeing Sebastian Bergmann’s talk PHP 7: Reality Check I was empowered by his reasoning that it’s not worth putting support in outdated PHP versions and focus on the current and future versions that will make a difference in functionality, performance and security.

For this reason I would like to announce that the European Commission (EC) VAT Information Exchange System (VIES) project will no longer support PHP 5 and uses PHP 7.1 features to ensure better security and application control.

We’re going to follow the release and support cycle of PHP itself and will only offer security fixes on our 1.x branch. If you can’t wait to run our VIES service in your PHP 7.1 web application, you can go ahead and update directly through Composer.

composer update dragonbe/vies

If you’re starting a new project and you would like to add VAT validation you can install it easily with Composer.

composer require dragonbe/vies

As mentioned, I will only provide security fixes on the 1.x branch until the end of this year! If you’re already using this VIES project in your own projects, I urge you to upgrade to PHP 7.1 to enjoy future features and updates.