PHP 5

PHP 5

Soon after, the demand for more common object-oriented features increased immensely, and Andi came up with the idea of rewriting the objected-oriented part of the Zend Engine. Zeev and Andi wrote the "Zend Engine II: Feature Overview and Design" document and jumpstarted heated discussions about PHP’s future. Although the basic language has stayed the same, many features were added, dropped, and changed by the time PHP 5 matured.

For example, namespaces and multiple inheritance, which were mentioned in the original document, never made it into PHP 5. Multiple inheritance was dropped in favor of interfaces, and namespaces were dropped completely. You can find a full list of new features in Chapter, "What Is New in PHP 5?" PHP 5 is expected to maintain and even increase PHP’s leadership in the web development market. Not only does it revolutionizes PHP’s objectoriented support but it also contains many new features which make it the ultimate web development platform.

The rewritten XML functionality in  PHP 5 puts it on par with other web technologies in some areas and overtakes them in others, especially due to the new SimpleXML extension which makes it ridiculously easy to manipulate XML documents. In addition, the new SOAP, MySQLi, and variety of other extensions are significant milestones in PHP’s support for additional technologies.