PHP 5.3 alpha1 released
PHP 5.3 alpha1 was released 1st August 2008, you can see the news entry for this here.
Along with this alpha release are quite a few drastic changes and some cool new features.
Firstly it says ‘The PHP 5.3.0 branch will only support Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, and Server 2008. Support has been dropped for Windows 98, ME, and NT.’.
This to me means PHP is being improved greatly for the Windows platform and focus is being given to using Windows and PHP together in a production environment.
Also included in this release is the excellent PHP_Archive package found on pear.php.net.
For those not familar with the PHP_Archive package what it provides is an archive format similar to zip but which works for PHP files, the cool thing is you can package up your PHP applications into one single PHP archive file and distribute them, PHP code can be run from directly inside the archive without any performance loss (if you install APC it actually improves performance!).
PHP_Archive will now be available as a PHP extension, meaning better performance and new features. Of particular note is the ability to create normal tar or zip format archives and convert them to a phar archive.
Unfortunately I do not have time to compile PHP from source code and the windows binaries are not available yet so I have to wait to have a play around with the new features :(
Hopefully not long now as it states on php.net alpha2 will include windows binaries and should be available a few weeks after alpha1.
