PHP 5.0.0 Beta 2 has been released. This is the first feature complete version of PHP 5, and we recommend for PHP users to try it. PHP 5 is still not ready for production use!
Some of the more major changes include:
- PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2.
- XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, 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.
- A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP
objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
- Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access
low-level socket operations on streams.
There have been many changes since Beta 1, some of them documented in the NEWS
file and most language changes are documented in ZEND_CHANGES