The
development as well as evolution of languages is but very natural and
PHP 6 is the representation of the language's development as well as
growth. PHP 4 or PHP 5 had nothing fundamentally wrong but with PHP 6
some issues that were plaguing the language have been sorted, making the
language a lot more user-friendly. With respect to many aspects this
version has been like cleanup release. The improved language now
features a robustness and ease of use that draws the programmers to it,
making it ideal for web development at the enterprise level. Some of the
features that make it so functional are given below:
Unicode support- While
creating websites, character encoding is something that we hardly think
about. The only decision that has to be taken is the way to tell user
agent about the encoding used and even this is quite simple enough to
do. But while building applications, character encoding becomes a
problem and here the Unicode support helps a lot. This enables the
language to encode and decode automatically the output and input of
script which ensures that both user agent along with database receives
the encoding needed but without any additional functions for encoding
conversion.
Cleaning up the act-
In this version a lot of bugs as well as errors have been taken care of
which had previously resulted in problems like security holes and slow
scripts. Functions like safe_mode, register_globals and magic_quotes
have been take care of. In PHP 6, these features have disappeared; many
programmers have breathed a sigh of relief with this. Super globals had
some long versions such as $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS and register_long_arrays
which have disappeared. The mode dealing with PHP 5 classes' backwards
compatibility zend.ze1_compatibility_mode has been taken care of as
well.
OO functionality-
OO model has been improved a lot which can be said to be this version's
biggest improvement. The previous version had improved tremendously and
this version just carries this improvement further forward with the
addition of namespaces. Those familiar with C++ or XML namespaces have
ideas regarding the working of namespaces. These actually provide a
method to avoid name collisions among classes and functions but without
the use of prefixes for the naming. Objects, variables or functions are
grouped under a specific name by this so that class names can be used by
developers without any problems despite the fact that the particular
name may be used by somebody else multiple times.
Alternative PHP Cache-
An application's performance can be improved immensely through caching
which speaks for the huge demand for excellent opcode cache in PHP
default distribution. With demand there are people to cater to it,
resulting in APC or Alternative PHP Cache. This was available already
sometime back but this extension has now been included in the core for
default caching framework.
Further miscellaneous changes to extensions-
Basically PHP can be said to be an aggregation of extensions and
whatever form we have; in fact, it consists of all of that put together.
These extensions however, change and with that the collection does as
well. PHP 6 will follow in the footsteps of PHP 5.1, boasting of a great
combination of XML Writer extension for writing of XML files and XML
Reader enabled in its core distribution. This will allow people to work
easily with XML files.
Dismissal
of the library of ereg regular expressions is another change carried on
in core distribution. Instead this has been made an extension. The
previous functionality of ereg lied in being PCRE's competitor but due
to some problems it has been removed from core, making it an extension
instead.
Some
other new changes have been introduced to the language. Basically huge
feature updates have not been followed through but majorly a lot of
glitches have been eradicated which has made this language an easy tool
to work with for most application as well as website developers. In
fact, websites of some of the industry giants are run on PHP, making it
all the more an attractive platform for development. You can hire
developers from top php application development companies in India who can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.
We provide php web development services. If you would like to discuss with a certified php developer from our team, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
