PHP 6

Source: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

New PHP V6 features

PHP V6 is currently available as a developer snapshot, so you can download and try out many of the features and changes listed in this article. For features that have been implemented in the current snapshot, see Resources.

Improved Unicode support

Much improved for PHP V6 is support for Unicode strings in many of the core functions. This new feature has a big impact because it will allow PHP to support a broader set of characters for international support.

Namespaces

Namespaces are a way of avoiding name collisions between functions and classes without using prefixes in naming conventions that make the names of your methods and classes unreadable. So by using namespaces, you can have class names that someone else might use, but now you don't have to worry about running into any problems. Listing 1 provides an example of a namespace in PHP.

Web 2.0 features

Depending on how you use PHP and what your scripts look like now, the language and syntax differences in PHP V6 may or may not affect you as much as the next features, which are those that directly allow you to introduce Web 2.0 features into your PHP application.

SOAP

SOAP is one of the protocols that Web services "speak" and is supported in quite a few other languages, such as the Java programming language and Microsoft® .NET. Although there are other ways to consume and expose Web services, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), SOAP remains a common way of allowing different platforms to have interoperability.

XML

As of PHP V5.1, XMLReader and XMLWriter have been part of the core of PHP, which makes it easier for you to work with XML in your PHP applications. Like the SOAP extensions, this can be good news if you use SOAP or XML because PHP V6 will be a better fit for you than V4 out of the box.

Things removed

In addition to having new features, PHP V6 will not have some other functions and features that have been in previous versions. Most of these things, such as register_globals and safe_mode, are widely considered "broken" in current PHP, as they may expose security risks.

Features that will be removed from the PHP version include:

* magic_quotes
* register_globals
* register_long_arrays
* safe_mode

magic_quotes

Citing portability, performance, and inconvenience, the PHP documentation discourages the use of magic_quotes. It's so discouraged that it's being removed from PHP V6 altogether, so before upgrading to PHP V6, make sure that all your code avoids using magic_quotes. If you're using magic_quotes to escape strings for database calls, use your database implementation's parameterized queries, if they're supported.

Source: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/