These days, it is hard to imagine a web developer or an advanced web user who is not involved with PHP somehow. For all of you folks, there are some good news – PHP 5.4.0 has just been released. Of course, it will take a bit until it is well tested and pushed to most hosting companies, but you should take a brief look at the changelog to make sure you know what to expect. Some of my favorite changes are:
- Long-awaited removal of many configuration options: register_globals, register_long_arrays, allow_call_time_pass_reference, magic_quotes_gpc, etc.
- Long-awaited removal of some confusing session-related functions: session_register(), session_unregister(), and session_is_registered().
- Change of default_charset from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
- Added Traversable iterator in mysq_result for MySQLi.
- Plenty of performance improvements and memory optimization.
- Plenty of bug fixes.
Also, have a look at the migrating from 5.3 to 5.4 document.