PHP 5 coming soon

Thanks Digital Oracle...PHP version 5, expected to appear in beta form by March, 2003, and released in the summer of 2003. Significant performance improvements and a much more complete object-oriented programming environment will allow PHP to provide a powerful Web front end for enterprise-class .NET and J2EE-based applications.

One of the sweet side-effects of the new object-oriented model is improved performance. PHP4, when executing, does a lot of expensive data copying, but with the re-write of the core PHP engine in PHP5, that will end. PHP4 copied objects by value instead of by reference, meaning that objects were copied whenever variables were assigned or parameters were passed to a routine. In PHP5, instead of copying objects, objects are referred to by a handle, essentially an object pointer. The result is that both CPU performance and memory usage are improved. PHP5's performance improvements, coupled with the use of code caching accelerators such as IonCube, APC, or Zend Accelerator, will make PHP5 more competitive with other scripting choices.

Though PHP is widely used on many web sites, and for business Web applications worldwide, including inside some Fortune 100 companies, it is not widely known which larger companies are using it. That knowledge was trivialized by Yahoo's October announcement that they were going to migrate some (and eventually, probably all) Web applications from their proprietary yScript language to PHP. As one of the highest trafficked sites in the world, and one that runs on Apache and FreeBSD, this was a major win for PHP. "It gives us a real-world example of where PHP is being used -- 'mission-critical' -- all the things that corporate managers want to hear," says Suraski.

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