PHP 6: What to expect?

The launch of the new PHP 6 is doing the rounds for quite some time now. But the truth is there isn’t any version of PHP 6 out in the market. PHP’s latest update was PHP 5.4. There is no news of PHP 6 launch since then. There are quite a few reasons why this launch is delayed:

? Unicode support: The teal at PHP planned to use character encoding of UTF-16 for PHP 6 initially. But this in turn increased the complexity of code and caused double memory usage for strings. This slowed down the development and so this idea was dropped and Unicode implementation was restarted.

PHP 5.3: Many of the features which were going to be a surprise package of PHP 6 were introduced in version 5.3 itself and so the momentum of version 6 decreased.

No urgency: The latest version of PHP is working very well. There are no immediate changes required by developers in it and so due to this there is no burning urgency in launching PHP 6.

So now what all features are coming with the PHP 6 package is the big question. Here’s the speculative list of some of the important updates in the new version.

Unicode Support

During website development using PHP one hardly thinks about character encoding. One has to just decide the way the user agent is to be informed about the encoding which is to be used. Using Apache’s .htaccess file, one has to make that decision just once.

The question is what is to be done while building an application using PHP because it is at this time when the character encoding is problematic. To overcome this problem PHP 6 has come up with new Unicode support. Using it PHP automatically encodes and decodes the incoming and outgoing script. It does this making sure that both the user agent and database receive the encoding they need without any extra functions.

Cleanup

Every PHP programmer while programming has wished atleast once that functions register_globals, magic_quotes, and safe_mode never existed. Usage of these functions results in slow scripts and even security holes. Though programmer might not use it intentionally however these functions might be used in the program without programmer’s knowledge.

To overcome this PHP 6 has removed all these functions. Apart from this function like register_long_arrays is also removed in the new version along with zend.ze1_compatibilty_mode.

Improved Caching

PHP developers have decided to include APC (Alternative PHP Cache) in the core itself. They are including it as the default caching framework. Cache improves performance of any application. Hence after APC was made available in 2003 the demand for good opcode cache in the default distribution of PHP was fulfilled. And so its inclusion in core was taken in the latest version of PHP.

Extensions

PHP 6 is going to come up with XML Writer extension enabled in the core distribution of PHP. With XML Reader already added in it, the usability with XML will change drastically.

ereg regular expressions library will be removed from the core distribution and included as an extension. This is done because ereg is creating some problems. Similarly mime_magic will be moved from core and converted to an extension.

With all these changes PHP 6 looks more like a problem solver and cleanup for previous versions of PHP. However as the demand of PHP is increasing the developers too are gaining more and more recognition. PHP Web Development company in India has gained quite acknowledgement in recent times. This is because the developers here are highly advanced and have focused approach on client’s projects. So currently for anyone who is looking for good web developers, PHP development India is one of the best option to be considered.

About the author: Smartkathy is a Team Leader of PHP developers in one of the leading firm of web development company. She strongly recommends that PHP website development India is growing substantially because of many good programmers over there.