Cool Things in Php 5

Joshua Eichorn

PEAR Vice President

A little History

• July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0 released
• Nov 2006, PHP 5.2 released
• Go-php5.org
• December 31 2007, PHP4 EOL
• Upgrade Time

I don't care about support

Lots of reasons to upgrade

• Better OO
• Better XML
• Better Webservices
• Better Database libraries
• Userland code that acts like core constructs
• Faster

Better OO

• Standard Reason for PHP 5
• • public/private/protected
  • Unified constructor name __construct()
  • Destructor __destructor()
  • Interfaces
  • instanceof operator
  • final methods/classes
  • Explicit object cloning
  • Class constants
  • Static members/methods
  • abstract classes/methods
  • Class type hints
  • dereferencing support $obj->method()->method()
  • __autoload()

Better XML

• Real DOM Support
• No more leaks etc
• Based on libxml2 (fast)
• SimpleXML

Better Webservices

• JSON extension for quick serializing to from javascript
• SOAP extension that actually works

Better Database Libraries

• Sqlite built in (you always have a db)
• Mysqli extension supports all the mysql 4.1+ features
• PDO provides native abstraction of databases covers all the majors

Userland code that acts like core constructs

• A class can be used in a foreach (iterator)
• A class can be accessed like an array
• You can add virtual methods __call
• You can add virtual properties __get/__set

Faster

• PHP 5.2 added lots of speed improvements
• Faster require_once
• Better memory management
• Lots of other stuff

So Upgrade

• PHP 4 support is being dropped by everyone
• PHP 5 offers better faster easier to write code