Software Update: PHP 5.0.0 RC3

A new version of the hypertext preprocessor has been announced on the PHP.net site. It is the third release candidate of the 5.0.0 branch and the developers hope that this branch is now stable enough to be used in production environments. This release can be downloaded from the PHP site in three different flavors. In addition to the bzip2– and tarballpackages for Linux systems, there is also a variant for Windows as zip file fried. The changelog informs us of the following changes:

• Moved the PDFLib extension to PECL. (wez)
• Added MySQL 4.1.2-alpha and 4.1.3-beta support to MySQLI extension. (George)
• Added support for dumping private/protected properties to var_dump(). (Andrey)
• Added count() support for COM arrays. (wez)
• Added Firebird/InterBase UDF source that allows PHP functions to be called from SQL (Ard)
• Changed user error handler mechanism to relay to built-in error handler if it returns false. (Andrey)
• Changed class type hints for function parameters to not allow the passing of NULL values. (Andi)
• Changed tidy_node to tidyNode and removed tidy_exception. (John)
• Fixed ip2long() to return FALSE if an IP address passed to this function is not valid. (Derick)
• Fixed memory leak in memory manager. (Andi)
• Fixed problem with exceptions returning from include(). (Dmitry)
• Fixed bug #28641 (Instance of Interface). (Mark)
• Fixed bug #28430 (Extending mysqli class). (George)
• Fixed bug #28311 (Transparency detection code is off by 1). (Ilia, pikeman at pikeman dot sytes dot net)
• Fixed bug #28304 (Missing bounds check inside imagefilter()). (Ilia)
• Fixed bug #28300 (Userspace stream/filter names forced to lowercase). (Sarah)
• Fixed bug #28287 (stream_*_register() not calling __autoload()). (Sarah)
• Fixed bug #28267 (php_image_filter_contrast calls gdImageBrightness). (Ilia)
• Fixed bug #28239 (No results returned on SOAP call, no error given). (Dmitry)
• Fixed bug #28205 (num_rows property for statement object). (George)
• Fixed bug #28161 (COM: Array style properties could not be accessed). (wez)
• Fixed bug #28125 (ArrayObject leaks when accessing elements). (Mark)
• Fixed bug #28100 (NULL parameter support for mysqli_ssl_set). (George)
• Fixed bug #28099 (ArrayObject doesn’t implement ArrayAccess). (Mark)
• Fixed bug #27929 (SPL: change visibility of ArrayIterator::__construct). (Mark)
• Fixed bug #27640 (memory leak of registered_zend_ini_directives). (Dmitry)
• Fixed bug #27063 (SPL: ArrayObject does not handle PPP correctly). (Mark)