The PHP developers are pleased to announce the immediate availability of
PHP 4.3.0, the latest and greatest version of this extremely popular and
widely used scripting language.
This release contains a multitude of changes, bug fixes and improvements
over the previous one, PHP 4.2.3. It further elevates PHP's standing as
a serious contender in the general purpose scripting language arena. The
highlights of this release are listed below:
Command line interface
This version finalizes the separate command line interface (CLI) that
can be used for developing shell and desktop applications (with
PHP-GTK). The CLI is always built, but installed automatically only if
CGI version is disabled via --disable-cgi switch during configuration.
Alternatively, one can use make install-cli target. On Windows CLI can
be found in cli folder.
CLI has a number of differences compared to other server APIs. More
information can be found here:
* PHP Manual: Using PHP from the command line
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php
Streams
A very important "under the hood" feature is the streams API. It
introduces a unified approach to the handling of files, pipes, sockets,
and other I/O resources in the PHP core and extensions.
What this means for users is that any I/O function that works with
streams (and that is almost all of them) can access built-in protocols,
such as HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS, as well as custom protocols registered
from PHP scripts. For more information please see:
* List of Supported Protocols/Wrappers
http://www.php.net/manual/en/wrappers.php
* Streams API
http://www.php.net/manual/en/streams.php
New build system
This iteration of the build system, among other things, replaces the
slow recursive make with one global Makefile and eases the integration
of proper dependencies. Automake is only needed for its aclocal tool.
The build process is now more portable and less resource-consuming.
PHP 4.3.0 has many improvements and enhancements:
* GD library is now bundled with the distribution and it is
recommended to always use the bundled version
* vpopmail and cybermut extensions are moved to PECL
* several deprecated extensions (aspell, ccvs, cybercash, icap) and
SAPIs (fastcgi, fhttpd) are removed
* speed improvements in a variety of string functions
* Apache2 filter is improved, but is still considered experimental
(use with PHP in prefork and not worker (thread) model since many
extensions based on external libraries are not thread safe)
* various security fixes (imap, mysql, mcrypt, file upload, gd, etc)
* new SAPI for embedding PHP in other applications (experimental)
* much better test suite
* significant improvements in dba, gd, pcntl, sybase, and xslt
extensions
* debug_backtrace() should help with debugging
* error messages now contain URLs linking to pages describing the
error or function in question
* Zend Engine has some fixes and minor performance enhancements
* and TONS of other fixes, updates, new functions, etc
For the full list of changes in PHP 4.3.0, see the NEWS file
(http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php).
Thank you to all who coded, tested, and documented this release!
-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/
"It's an emergent property of connected human minds that
they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer
their uneasy sense of being too alone." -- Eben Moglen
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