PHP 5 RC1 Released

[tamarian]

http://www.php.net/

PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 Released!

[18-Mar-2004] The first Release Candidate of PHP 5 is finally here! The move from Beta stage to RC stage means that PHP 5 is now feature complete, and is quite stable - stable enough for everyone to start playing with. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

• The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
• A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. Additionally to a functional interface this new extension also includes an object-oriented interfaced and support for many of MySQL's new features such as prepared statements.
• SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website.
• A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
• 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.
• And lots more...

For changes since Beta 4, please consult the ChangeLog.

[cirisme]

I'm really liking some of the new OOP features.(or atleast what I've read on it) Can't wait for it to become stable.

[Guest]

Woo hoo, hopefully stable will come in short order.

[Trigunflame]

Still very buggy, the CLI gives all kinda weird errors, when compiling using settings for ensim 3.x.x I might try some simpler compiler switches tonight..

[perfectphp]

Yea, I wouldn't really care to install PHP5 until they've released a fully stable, complete v5. That's what I did with 4 and I was happy.

[Numd]

More info PHP5 at http://www.zend.com/php5/

I'm waiting stable version, PHP5 contains a good new functions & object models.

[Shane]

Has anyone testing vB on PHP5?

[nuno]

Has anyone testing vB on PHP5?

Let the Developers do what they do best.

[Guest]

I have 3.0.0 on apache 2 and php 5 RC1 with no known problems, im ganna upgrade mySQL to 4.1 tonight and see how that gose. Of course this is all on my dev-box

[Driv3r]

Cool thanks for posting this!

[Indy]

My experience with PHP5

Well, I just moved to my new server last week and had someone checkout my setup. (First time settings up a server via WHM) They added some small things here and there. The one thing that they did was to upgrade PHP from 4.3.3 to 5 RC1.

Prior to this, I had already moved over a trial run of my forum db and programs in preperattion of the "big move". Yes, it was screaming. Yes, the server loads never wanted to get off of .01. And yes, I was the only one on there.

After PHP was upgraded to 5 RC1, there was a very noticable latency when loading a page from the forums. About 95% of the page would load very fast, but took about 15-20 seconds to complete. I also noticed when running a top command that the server load was up around 3.0 and almost 100% of my 2Gig of RAM was busy! Again, I was the only one in there!!

After about 4 or 5 hours of playing with and monitoring this, including reboots, etc. I had PHP reverted. It was reverted to 4.3.5 RC4 and everything is back to normal! The forums are screaming right along with 200+ users online and the server load stays under .2 98% of the time. Tons of RAM left to boot. (Also tweaked my.cnf per Eva).

Perhaps PHP5 will be good. Perhaps the outfit settings it up missed some settings. All I know is that I'm not even going to consider it until a stable, final version is released and the dev guys here at vB or others have tested thoroughly!

Just my experience. That's all.
Dan

[cirisme]

You're certainly brave for trying it out live.(at least a lot braver than I!)

[Indy]

I didn't go live with it, but I'm glad I was staying on top of what was going on and caught it before I did!

[Trigunflame]

php 5 is fine for a stanard compile, but you throw in any of the bigger compiler options and it goes to hell.