The long-awaited PHP5 was finally officially released on July 13, local time. The release of PHP5 is considered a milestone version for both the PHP language itself and PHP users. Each PHP version before the release of PHP5 won the favor of many developers with its simple syntax, rich library functions, and extremely fast script interpretation and execution speed, and has almost become the preferred WEB development language on the *NIX platform. However, from the perspective of the language itself, PHP's grammar, especially the OO grammar design, is not perfect. Of course, this is related to the original design purpose of the author of the PHP language.
As we all know, PHP was just a template system written in Perl at first, and its subsequent development idea was to provide convenience for the rapid development of WEB programs as much as possible. A large number of library functions have been added, while the development of language models has been relatively slow. Although object-oriented design has been added to PHP4, its language model is not perfect and lacks basic elements such as constructors, destructors, abstract classes (interfaces), and exception handling. This greatly limits the ability to use PHP to complete large-scale applications.
The birth of PHP5 has fundamentally changed the above-mentioned shortcomings of PHP. The adoption of Zend II engine, complete object model and improved syntax design. Finally, PHP becomes a fully designed scripting language with true object-oriented capabilities. We predict that the emergence of PHP5 will bring a new round of peak improvements in various library and application development to the entire PHP community.
PHP5.0 version has enhanced the following functions. First, fully implement object orientation. In the PHP4 version, deep copy is the default value of object substitution, but in PHP5, shallow copy is the default value. Therefore, PHP5 is not fully compatible with PHP4, however, it provides a feature called PHP Compatibility Mode. Next is the XML function. The PHP5.0 version supports an XML processing interface called SimpleXML that can intuitively access XML data. At the same time, it also strengthens XML Web service support, and standard supports SOAP extension module.
In terms of database, the new version of PHP provides a new interface designed to access MySQL - MySQLi. In addition to the previous interface, you can also use new features of MySQL such as object-oriented interface and prepared statements (Prepared Statement). In addition, PHP5.0 is also bundled with a small-capacity RDBMS-SQLite.