Final Version of PHP 5 Released
 

According to a statement posted Tuesday evening on the PHP Web site, the final version of PHP 5.0 is now available for download.

PHP is an open source server-side scripting language that is especially popular for building database-driven Web applications. The language, created in 1995, is currently managed by the non-profit Apache Software foundation. It is available for free download under a version of the Apache GPL open source license. According to a November, 2003 Netcraft survey, PHP is tone of the most popular server-side scripting languages, currently running on more than half the 14.5 million Apache-based Web sited included in the survey.

The PHP 5.0 release includes a number of significant changes, including native XML support, a completely rebuilt scripting engine, improved Web services support using a built-in SOAP extension. The PHP 5.0 update also includes a bundled version of the SQLite open source database, eliminating the need for developers to install a full-scale version of the SQL database engine for Web applications.

PHP 5.0 can be downloaded free of charge at: http://www.php.net.

I dunno, I wouldn't trust it for a few more releases...

But then again I switched to PHP4 from PHP3 about a year behind the rest of the world.

already using it for few months, glad they moved it to stable
i know what i'll be doing tonight :)

i will wait a bit before installing it on my boxes.

Yeh, I was just chatting with my server tech and he advised against it. Apparently there are some compatibility issues with older PHP scripts or something.

ay thats not easy

Well there can be with any language.

It's a good idea to set up a test box and mirror your current sites .. then upgrade on the test box to see how it runs.

If your sites are PHP driven don't go switching versions of PHP without testing first. Nothing's broken now, no need to be fixing it.

It's also probably a good idea to wait a few versions to get any bugs weeded out. Early release versions of any software are going to get a lot more testing than a beta version. Which is why so many open source developers release early. The early adopters (aka risk takers) will find a lot of the bugs the beta testers didn't and in a few releases you'll have a much more stable product to trust on your production servers.

exciting but what'll be really cool is the new php gtk stuff.

am i the only one that has played with this?

there few things i doubt they made a backward compability have to check on that.
anyone upgdrading to the new version, should test their scripts off production first or check release notes what has been changed. first time i installed php5 my board stopped working. i had new version of Invision, which had classes definitions after calsses have been called - doesn't work in 5. you have to define a class then call it.

but my own scripts worked fine. so i sticked with php5
btw its also not compatible with current Zend Optimizer.

This link was given to me by some of my friends at Zend. Take a peak it has some pretty good information.

http://www.zend.com/php5/index.php