PHP 5 Release Candidate 1

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Release Candidate 1.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

• The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.

• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).

• A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. Additionally to a functional interface this new extension also includes an object-oriented interfaced and support for many of MySQL's new features such as prepared statements.

• SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website.

• A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.

• A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.

• Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.

• And lots more...

PHP 5 is now feature complete and quite stable. The purpose of the release candidate is to start widespread testing and use in non-mission critical applications.

Enjoy!