What’s new in PHP 5.5 Beta1 release

PHP 5.5 has been released as beta1 with numerous new features. It implies that no further features will be added till the next PHP release. It has included integration of Zend Optimizer+, array_column function which simplifies the extraction of columns from multidimensional arrays and support for non-scalar iterator keys via the foreach() loop. It has also included the option to modify process titles in CLI/CLI server SAPIs.

The inclusion of Zend Optimizer+ was a recent decision from the developers. It enhances the performance of the ‘bytecode’ which is generated by the interpreter from PHP source code and allows to load PHP applications. This in turn helps to increase the performance and speed of PHP applications. The Zend Optimizer+ was included in the way of Zend opcache extension. Other opcache technologies like APC (Alternative PHP Cache), which used to be the default technology will be dropped. Zend CTO Zeev Suraski had already put forward a proposal of integrating Zend Optimizer+ component into the Open Source PHP distribution. His request for comments (RFC) said, the Optimizer+ offers a better performance than APC with an improvement of 5 to 20% in terms of requests per second. It increases PHP execution speed through opcode caching. It also enhances server performance by storing compiled PHP bytecode in the shared memory, thus the code wouldn’t be read from the disk and compiled when used for the second time.

Other new features added in PHP 5.5 include the support for generators and a new password hashing API. It will facilitate developers to generate a secure salted password hash using Bcrypt. A salt will not be needed as it will be auto-generated by the API and added as a random component to the password. The Bcrypt hash makes longer password difficult to crack as it requires a lot of memory.

Other enhancements in the PHP 5.5 beta version include:

1. Support for try/catch blocks
2. Support for list() in foreach loop
3. Array/string dereferencing
4. ext/intl improvements
5. Facilitates using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions

A complete list of all the improvements and bug fixes can be availed from the PHP News file on github.

CakePHP Development will now be facilitated with numerous features which would make development processes easier and faster.