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PHP 4.3.0 w/ZEND 2 Alpha

Posted by timothy on from the folding-things-in dept.

Twintop writes: "PHP.net has released the a new version of PHP 4 to include the new Zend 2 Scripting Engine. This alpha update adds more increased support for Java and .NET technologies. More can be found on PHP.net and Beta News.com."

5 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. PHP has finally made it... by metacosm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Long ago, I used php on a very small project, and it worked wonderfully (due to the utter simplicity of the project).

    Since then, I have not touched it, due to immature error handling, terrible objects and inconsistancies between functions and methods.

    It seems that this version (based on the Code Samples) has fixed most everything I once hated, and that I might get to use php in a production enviroment sometime soon.

    Most important things to me are try/catch and destructors.

  2. So misguided by andy@petdance.com · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm so frustrated by the culture of performance:
    Private Members.
    The Zend Engine 2.0 introduces private member variables. Note that for performance reasons no error message is emitted in case of an illegal access to a private member variable.
    "For performance reasons", they're ignoring the encapsulation that would help correctness...
    1. Re:So misguided by andy@petdance.com · · Score: 5, Informative
      Well, when you consider that PHP is primarily used as a scripting language on web servers, it makes sense to optimize for performance. You can't have processes hanging around too long, else they start to clog things up and pretty soon you have a really lovely rackmounted paperweight.

      And that's what happens now if you do any amount of use of classes. Unless you buy the Zend Optimizer, anything that uses classes requires tons of recompilation of the PHP code for each page. We found that we were spending 20% of real response time just recompiling the class files for each page.

      This performance tweak is just a drop in the bucket compared to that.

    2. Re:So misguided by cymen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Have you tried the open source PHP optimizer APC:

      http://apc.communityconnect.com/

  3. Alpha version by Wonko42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    It should have been pointed out in the article that this is an ALPHA version based on the 4.3.0 tree. This is not 4.3.0.