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 https://www.php.net/downloads.php. For a complete list of changes, please refer to https://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
- XML support has been completely redone in PHP5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (https://www.xmlsoft.org/).
- SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website, https://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]