From the ‘Open Source Language of the Web’ files:
PHP 5.4 has just officially been release – and it’s a really big deal.
I’ve been tracking the development of PHP 5.4 since at least November of 2010 and the early alpha milestones. This is the first major PHP update since PHP 5.3 came out in June of 2009. In alot of ways though, the PHP 5.4 release is more important since it will be an evolutionary step forward that likely won’t require code rewrites.
The big item for me is performance and memory management which are improved by double digit percentages. That’s right – if you want to make your PHP driven website go faster – use PHP 5.4
From a devops perspective, PHP 5.4 has a built-in webserver, which could be a huge benefit for developers.
Developers will also benefit from the new Traits method for code re-use. Uh huh, PHP code with PHP 5.4 will be cleaner than ever before.
“A Trait is intended to reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling a developer to reuse sets of methods freely in several independent classes living in different class hierarchies,” PHP.net’s page on Traits explains.
Going a step further, PHP 5.4 will finally rid PHP of an evil that has been lurking in the code for years. Magic Quotes have officially reached end of life (they were deprecated in php 5.3 but now they’re finally gone).
While the php open source community has names this new PHP release as a dot release, at least one PHP luminary, thinks it could have been much more.
“PHP 5.4 is a HUGE milestone (IMO warrants a major version # :)” Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans tweeted.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing…PHP 6!!!
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
