New Features in PHP 6.0

“PHP is the only oldest language that is fully dedicated to the web domain. It has nothing to do with others and it does what it is intended for. With every passing version, there is certain modification, addition and removal of features as per the demands of the industry and PHP does it in a seamless manner. This time, the industry is flooded with many assumptions, predictions and theories to find their dream land PHP v6. It is one of the highly anticipated versions of PHP; though, many said that PHP will directly release PHP7 version, but now it comes with PHP6 with some enhanced features. The release of PHP 6.0 was indubitably made to defer for long. However, the upgrade that kept most of us keyed up definitely planked in a horde of features to look forward to. But for most, the integration of native Unicode UTF-8 in the upgraded version looked preeminent of all. Listed below are some new features in PHP 6.0 that are hopeful of making many users swap to its structure”.

Internationalization: Internationalization or I18N is known for cross cultural or cross location programming. It helps in creating cross culture application with some local inputs like date, time, language, currencies and phone numbers etc. It is highly effective in crafting cross region websites for the industry. The highlight remains the embedment of native Unicode (UTF-8) to the core. Also, improved array indexing is a significant part of PHP 6.0 (enhanced array indexing is anticipated to induce the possibility of being used to sub string). Will discuss more on the next section i.e. Unicode Support.

Enhanced 64bit Support: It is awaited as yet however; PHP 6.0 envisages support for 64bit in near future. As a result, internal code compatibility will not be a hitch in any way. The security level will also increase and the standard of programming will definitely improve a lot. With this, the speed and efficiency of PHP application will also increase to a significant level. So, it is really a wow feature for PHP developers who know how to implement it perfectly fine.

Unicode Support: So far, UTF-8 has proven to be the most efficient alternative as default encoding for string values. Although UTF-16 could not thrive at being a part, the framework hopes to bring Unicode support, design and implementation for enhanced usability. As discussed above in I18N i.e. there are 18 characters in between I and N of Internationalization can help PHP developers in building cross geographic location websites using Unicode. Suppose your client want a website to be developed for 3 different languages like English, French and Belgium. Then, we can do it using Unicode. There will be a content file that keeps the translation version of each words and in the programming application, the PHP developer will keep levels for every field. Now, with Unicode this is possible. The different language words can be written in Unicode and saved into the content file and retrieved as when required by the application. Then according to some local data as discussed above i.e. Time, date, language and currency etc contents will be rendered on the web page. In short, this is highly important in creating multi lingual website in PHP.

Internal API Cleanup: There is no doubt that internal APIs for PHP platform has been on the rise since years. But, PHP 6.0 aims at building developer friendly APIs – which might extend to hash. To notify, hashes are largely employed for internal storage which further lead to the need of internal API cleanup. And since, the stream API tends to go through unfortunate ‘code duplication’, the new feature focuses on resolving the inconsistency and code duplication concerns. In the Cleanup process, the efficiency increases and the application become more stable and optimized as a result, hence improving the overall user experience.

Improved Performance: Performance is the key factor of every language, every version and every upgrade. Fortunately, PHP 6 is more efficient than that of its preceding version. Undoubtedly it will improve the overall productivity of the application and hence the user experience. Another prominent tweak comes in the form of enhanced performance by the framework. PHP 6.0 is likely to offer page level (OpCode) caching through moving Alternative PHP Cache into the PHP core. Along with this, the release unveils the new function of ‘break to label’ – which basically enables the transport of a break to a label (resembling a goto).

Removed Features from PHP: PHP 6.0 takes off magic quotes from its structure. However, developers would look forward to it if the upgraded version adds traits support, C# -style properties with getters/setters, or enable function call chaining. Along with that register_globals, safe_mode are also removed. register_globals is an important feature of PHP and if it is removed then it becomes a hurdle for the PHP developers while dealing with this parameter. I will suggest you to turn this value off for security concern. Because, remove of register_globals enables the users to add, delete or even modify the query string without any hassle and that may lead to fatal error in the application. So, be cautious of these features and accordingly implement them understanding their potential importance.

Warning Free Code: And yes, CodeIgniter eventually emerged as a significant part of this website programming language. Although code quality analyzer has gone astray, the CodeIgniter framework boasts of its warning free code function. There is no doubt that PHP 6.0 has been garnering much of attention since last few years, however it is certainly anticipated to become a popular choice as a hosting control panel vendor. This is really effective in avoiding false positive warnings which was there in the previous versions. Now, the PHP developer will be happier to find proper notification and essential warnings in the application.

Besides these, there are a slew of features that are likely to be amalgamated into PHP 6.0 with time. Though PHP 5.3 integrated many of the functions that were supposed to be embedded into PHP 6.0, the framework still has all the right reasons to intrigue developers for the most part. Also, we cannot forget the removal of register_globals and safe_mode which came as part of PHP 5.4 Alpha (while it was primarily a part of PHP 6.0).

And if you would like to harness the full potential of PHP web application development and are looking for a software development partner to do so, feel free to just drop in a mail at sales at Mindfire Solutions dot com and we would respond in one business day!