PHP is one of the most important web development language used by the developers. Almost all the versions of PHP that have been released till now have only added to the much valued image of the language. But the most awaited version has that been of the PHP 5.6.0. Being a PHP software developer you are aware of the fact that the majority of the code is not written by you. Another thing that you realize is that it is easier to write new code rather than fixing the older one. Thus debugging is something that really requires a new approach.
Thanks to the release of PHP 5.6.0 the new phpdbg is going to be a prominent feature of this latest version of the language. It is not only going to help the PHP software developer but would also herald a new beginning in the web development process. The best part is that you would not have to compile the phpdbg yourself and use Netbeans to get it running.
Some of the other important features that would be included in the PHP 5.6.0 are:
Exponential operator
These new exponential operators works so like to arithmetic operators that we learnt in school.
Constant scalar expressions
We can now write a scalar expression involving numeric and string literals and/or constants in contexts where PHP previously expected a static value, such as constant and property declarations and default function arguments.
- Importing namespaced functions
- Streams for post data
- Variadic functions
- Default character-Encoding improvements
- TLS improvements.
Extracting more from the release of PHP 5.6.0, there are some more changes with the new version that may affect compatibility as :
- Array keys won’t be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal.
- json_decode() is more strict in JSON syntax parsing.
- Stream wrappers now verify peer certificates and host names by default when using SSL/TLS.
- GMP resources are now objects.
- Mcrypt functions now require valid keys and Ivs.
It is no doubt the best update of PHP version, offering more performance and changes to syntax that could use variadic functions passing any number of arguments now.
All these new features would simply go on to make sure that the PHP software developer has his job cut out for him. Developing websites or doing other programming would become a lot more fun and easy with these new features added to PHP.