PHP 5.0.0 Beta 1

[via Sterling, 0] The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Both source packages and a Win32 build are available, you can find these packages at http://www.php.net/downloads.php . For a complete list of changes, please refer to http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php .

Some of the more major changes include:

– PHP5 features the Zend Engine 2. For a list of Zend Engine 2
changes, please visit http://www.php.net/zend-engine-2.php

– XML support has been completely redone in PHP5, all extensions
are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library
(http://www.xmlsoft.org/ ).

– SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite,
please visit their website, http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/

– Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access
low-level socket operations on streams.

– Due to issues surrounding the MySQL 4.0 license, the MySQL libraries
are no longer bundled with PHP. For more information on these
licensing changes please see the MySQL licensing policy [1]

Note: This is a beta version. It should not be used in production or even semi-production web sites. There are known bugs in it, and in addition, some of the features may change (based on feedback). We encourage you to download and play with it (and report bugs[2] if you find any!), but please do not replace your production installations of PHP 4 at this time.

[0] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=105691130207273&w=2
[1] http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing.html
[2] http://bugs.php.net/

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