What's New in PHP 5

(Page 1 of 4 )

The long anticipated PHP 5 release comes with a slew of new features aimed at simplifying development with PHP. With PHP 5 comes the introduction of exception handling, the Standard PHP Library (SPL), enhanced support for XML, reflection, and quite a few enhancements to the object oriented features of the language. PHP 5 also offers a sizable list of new functions, many of which will not be covered in this article but are available in the manual.

XML

PHP 5 by default installs XML support and offers a new extension, SimpleXML. All XML functions are now standardized on the libxml2 library and are fully W3C standards compliant. SimpleXML is quite possibly the most valuable addition to PHP in years, providing a traversable structure to work on XML documents, allowing you to simply change values in the structure and write the file out with only a few lines of code. The XML functionality that has been available through PHP in the past has been quite rudimentary and required a fair amount of programming work to use, so it is not uncommon to see PHP 4 applications using XML without ever touching the xml functions.

PHP 5 also offers a replacement extension for DOMXL (available in "experimental" form in PHP 4) with the DOM extension. This extension allows you to work on your XML files using the DOM object model and is superior to SimpleXML particularly when you are not certain what document format to expect with your application. While DOM is more powerful, SimpleXML is much quicker to implement and easier to get a handle on for beginner programmers. Both of the extensions are robust and well thought out, and whichever suits your programming needs and taste, you will be using a powerful extension that is light years beyond what was available in PHP 4.

Next: Database Support >>
 

More PHP Articles
More By David Fells

Comments On: What's New in PHP 5

· Yep I fully agree PHP is great, and should start being used for large projects. I've...    · As a side note, the additionally exceptions mentioned in point #6 (on page 3) are...    · hi,nice outline.nevertheless: there's no "virtual function" construct in PHP...    · You are correct that the virtual keyword doesn't exist, I guess I got carried away...    · ya that's fine I was just pointing it out to people that may be searching for it    · PHP is definitely improving as time goes on; however, I think that part of the...   >>> Post your comment now!