Software update: PHP 5.0 beta 1

The makers of the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor informed us that a new beta version of the scripting language of the same name is available. This brings us to version number 5.0.0 beta 1. One of the most important changes is the switch to version 2 of the Zend Engine, and the XML support has also had a major overhaul. the complete changelog looks like this:

• Switch to using Zend Engine 2, which includes numerous engine level improvements. A full list is available at http://www.php.net/zend-engine-2.php†
• The SQLite ( extension is now bundled and enabled by default. (Wez, Marcus, Tal)
• Improved the speed of internal functions that use callbacks by 40% due to a new internal fast_call_user_function() function. (Sterling)
• Completely Overhauled XML support (Rob, Sterling, Chregu, Marcus)
  • Brand new Simplexml extension
  • New DOM extension
  • New XSL extension
  • Moved the old DOM-XML and XSLT extensions to PECL
  • ext/xml can now use both libxml2 and expat to parse XML
  • Removed bundled expat
• Removed the bundled MySQL client library. (Sterling)
• New php.ini options:
  • “session.hash_function” and “session.hash_bits_per_character”. (Sascha)
  • “mail.force_extra_paramaters”. (Derick)
  • “register_long_arrays”. (Zeev)
• Improved the streams support: (Wez, Sarah, Ilia)
  • Improved performance of readfile(), fpassthru() and some internal streams operations under Win32.
  • stream_socket_client() – similar to fsocken(), but more powerful.
  • stream_socket_server() – Creates a server socket.
  • stream_socket_accept() – Accept a client connection.
  • stream_socket_get_name() – Get local or remote name of socket.
  • stream_copy_to_stream()
  • stream_get_line() – Reads either the specified number of bytes or until the ending string is found.
  • Added context property to userspace streams object.
  • Added generic crypto interface for streams (supports dynamic loading of OpenSSL)
  • Added lightweight streaming input abstraction to the Zend Engine scanners to provide uniform support for include()’ing data from PHP streams across all platforms.
  • Added ‘string.base64’ stream filter.
  • Renamed stream_register_wrapper() to stream_wrapper_register().
• Improved the GD extension: (Pierre-Alain Joye, Ilia)
  • imagefilter() – Apply different filters to image. (Only available with bundled GD library)
  • Antialiased drawing support:
    • imageantialias() – (de)active antialias
    • imageline() and imagepolygon() antialias support
• Changed the length parameter in fgetss() to be optional. (Moriyoshi)
• Changed ini parser to allow for handling of quoted multi-line values. (Ilia)
• Changed get_extension_funcs() to return list of the built-in Zend Engine functions if “zend” is specified as the module name. (Ilia)
• Changed array_search() to accept also objects as a needle. (Moriyoshi)
• Changed ext/mcrypt to require libmcrypt version 2.5.6 or greater. (Derick)
• Changed uniqid() parameters to be optional and allow any prefix length. (Mark)
• Added new icon function. (Moriyoshi)
  • iconv_strlen()
  • iconv_substr()
  • iconv_strpos()
  • iconv_strrpos()
  • iconv_mime_decode()
  • iconv_mime_encode()
• Added misc. new functions:
  • ldap_sasl_bind(). ([email protected], Jani)
  • imap_getacl(). (Dan, Holger Burbach)
  • file_put_contents(). (Sterling)
  • proc_nice() – Changes priority of the current process. (Ilia)
  • pcntl_getpriority() and pcntl_setpriority(). (Ilia)
  • idate(), date_sunrise() and date_sunset(). (Moshe Doron)
  • strpbrk() – Searches a string for a list of characters. (Ilia)
  • get_headers() – Returns headers sent by the server of the specified URL. (Ilia)
  • str_split() – Breaks down a string into an array of elements based on length. (Ilia)
  • array_walk_recursive(). (Ilia)
  • array_combine(). (Andrey)
• Added optional parameter to get_browser() to make it return an array. (Jay)
• Added optional parameter to openssl_sign() to specify the hashing algorithm.([email protected], Derick)
• Added optional parameter to sha1(), sha1_file(), md5() and md5_file() which makes them return the digest as binary data. (Michael Bretterklieber, Derick)
• Added optional parameter to mkdir() to make directory creation recursive. (Ilia)
• Added optional parameter to file() which makes the result array not contain the line endings and to skip empty lines. (Ilia)
• Added new range() functionality:
  • Support for float modifier. (Ilia)
  • Detection of numeric values ​​inside strings passed as high & low. (Ilia)
  • Properly handle the situations where high == low. (Ilia)
  • Added an optional step parameter. (Jon)
• Added encoding detection feature for expat XML parser. (Adam Dickmeiss, Moriyoshi)
• Added missing multibyte (unicode) support and numeric entity support to html_entity_decode(). (Moriyoshi)
• Added IPv6 support to ext/sockets. (Sarah)
• Added “ftp://” wrapper support to opendir(), stat() and unlink(). (Sarah)
• Added context options ‘method’, ‘header’ and ‘content’ for ” fopen wrapper. (Sara)
• Added input filter support. See README.input_filter for more info. (Rasmus)
• Added a replace count for str_[i]replace(), see bug #8218. (Sarah)
• Fixed is_executable() to be available also on Windows. (shane)
• Fixed dirname() and strip_tags() to be binary-safe. (Moriyoshi)
• Fixed bug #24098 (crash in pathinfo()). (Ilia)
• Fixed bug #21985 and #22064 (various mb_send_mail() issues). (Moriyoshi)
• Fixed bug #21600 (Assign by reference function call changes variable contents). (Zeev)