Oscar Trelles

PHP 5 Beta Release

I might have been under my rock when the release of PHP 5 Beta 1 was announces. I was really looking forward to test PHP 5 in my servers, although I’m far from being a PHP developer/programmer… as a matter of fact I barely program with ActionScript

Well, there is a long list of the new developments in this release of PHP 5, but from all of them there is one that caught my attention: they removed the bundled MySQL client library. Instead, PHP 5 comes with SQLite embedded.

Another things worth a mention is the improvements to the GD library (added ability to apply filters to images and anti-aliased drawing support), and the fact that they completely overhauled PHP’s XML support. Among the miscellaneous functions added, there is one that I’ve been waiting for in particular: str_split(), it breaks down a string into an array of elements based on length.