[TYPO3-core] System and browser requirements

[Benjamin Mack]

Hey everybody,

I wanted to summarize and ask for your opinion on the system
requirements and browser requirements for the current and next releases.

For browsers, I only talk about backend interface (and frontend editing).

What we have so far:

TYPO3 4.5 LTS (up to 6.1 I think)

* PHP: 5.2.x - 5.5
* MySQL: 5.0 - 5.5
* Browsers: IE6+ and all fancy modern browser

Supported until April 2015

TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS

* PHP 5.3.7 - 5.5
* MySQL: 5.1 - 5.6
* Browsers: IE8+ and other modern (desktop) ones

Supported until April 2017

And now for the next version, which will probably be the basis for our
next LTS process. Maybe we can find an agreement right now, so we can
work on the code basis right away once the master branch is set up for
our next target version (we can call it 6.3, 7.0, whatever you want ;-)
but that's not the topic here :)).

Next TYPO3 CMS release

* PHP: 5.4 - 5.5 / 5.6
* MySQL: 5.5 - 5.6 (although 5.1 will probably still work)
* Browsers: IE9+, other modern desktop browsers (latest versions as they
have silent upgrades), maybe even going mobile, but that depends on our
progress.

If we could agree on the above, I see a lot of improvements (I also have
some patches cleaning up CSS):

HTML5 / CSS
 * With IE10 comes the real deal for form fields and form validation
etc. where we could drop some JS code, but this could be solved for IE9
with some shim behavior to fill in the missing pieces.
 * IE9 supports media queries and generated content (:before, :after)
the right way, opacity etc. so no filter stuff anymore on our CSS code.

JavaScript
 * We could make use of jQuery 2.0 (lower footprint, no legacy plugins,
as the plugins we want to use need to be compatible with the latest API,
so less hassle in future TYPO3 releases)
 * IE10 would be a better choice here if we use Web Sockets in the
future, which I see as a good replacement for e.g. the login box popping
up. However, we could use long-polling AJAX requests for IE9 still as
fallback.

PHP
 * PHP 5.4 introduces traits where we could benefit in terms of
performance if possible (haven't tested it yet)
 * PHP 5.4 brings a nice JSON serialization interface for objects that
might help in the future for standardized JSON/AJAX calls.

MySQL
 * We still treat MySQL (also because of the SQL ANSI standard) as it
should be with 3.23 or 4.0, but this area could be really interesting
once we identify how we could use stored procedures at al in a unified
way across all database systems. This could be a huge performance
improvement (think of all the tree traversing stuff in BE and FE). The
introduction of foreign keys might be helpful as well.

As a matter of fact, this also raises a good discussion about what
functionality we should/could deprecate in the next versions, but that
should also be discussed in a different topic.

So: What do you think about the proposed requirements?

All the best,
Benni.