PHP 5.1.0 Released

kv9 writes "A new release of PHP5 is available. This version includes over 400 bugfixes, performance improvements over the 5.0.x branch, new date handling code, new versions of PCRE/SQLite/PEAR and over 30 new core/extension functions. A number of security fixes are also present and users are recommended to upgrade."

Comments

Advances/Alternative to the server

[Kunta Kinte]

PHP's big problem is not language features anymore. It's the lack of innovation in the PHP server program.

Zend refuses to add basic features such as a basic accelerator ( PHP scripts get recompiled on every request ). In fact, there was a rumor that Zend bought and killed http://sourceforge.net/projects/turck-mmcache/, the best accelerator out there because it competed with their commercial product.

I understand that money has to be made for development to continue, but that's no way to compete.

PHP server needs true session and application scope variables. File-based session variables it has right now means that any variable that's not serializable ( eg. file descriptor ) can not be saved in the session scope. This is a huge problem. It results in developers making countless round trips to their database to serialize data, and hence making PHP scripts more dependant on close/performant database in general. There was an mmap based solution being worked on, but haven't heard much about it lately.

Other web environments have had these features for years.

I'm guessing that that sought of restriction on the PHP server will continue until an alternative server is developed and begins to gain popularity.

Re:Many improvement...

[g2devi]

Relating to this comment:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169 325&cid=14113043

It's true that PHP suffers from various naming conventions, but namespaces might me the answer.

For PHP 6.0, does anyone know if the core developers are thinking of moving most builtin libraries into namespaces? For instance:
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.oci-commit.ph p
could be placed in the "builtin\oci" namespace and
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.ocicommit.php
could be placed in the "builtin\legacy\oci" namespace.

You could quickly convert all PHP5 to PHP6 simply by adding the line:
. . . import builtin\*;
to the top of every file to make all builtin functions global (the way they are in PHP5).

Apps written in PHP5 would still work without the import, but they'd get a warning (which could be switches off in the php.ini).

Some more alternatives to MySQL

[Elrac]

I apologize for being a bit off topic, but I'd like to throw in a couple of cents' worth on newly emerged alternatives in the "free DB" arena. Hopefully PHP support for these will be forthcoming forthwith:

• IBM has spiffed up Cloudscape to be somewhat compatible to DB2, renamed it to Derby and is giving it away
• Oracle is giving away a mildly crippled version of its DB, I don't remember the exact circumstances
• ADABAS, also known as SAP DB, is now also FOSS
• Firebird, née Interbase, was freed years ago and is said to be working well and under active development. I don't know why so few people seem to like it.
• I believe I heard about SQL Server being "free" under some circumstances too, but I'm not sure.

So... many thanks to MySQL for being a forerunner in the "free DB" department, and more thanks to other, formerly proprietary-only vendors for making their products a little more accessible to the common man!