The discussions about the new PHP 5.0 release is rife in the web developer community. This article will highlight the key aspects of PHP's advances to improve your web application's functionality.
What to Expect in PHP 5.0 - PHP 5.0 Will Take the World by Storm (Page 3 of 4 )
The Zend website gives a summary and tutorials on using the Zend 2.0 Engine with the latest PHP 5.0 release. Many articles you will read about PHP 5.0 will inform you to the great new OO (Object Orientated) ideology, which will make PHP much stronger and efficient, especially when it comes to large scaled application development.
In the Zend 2.0 Engine, Object has been treated much differently with the thanks to Andi Gutmans. Objects now will be treated as object handles, which will be given an index in a global table.
This brings up an important fact and should not be confused. The fact that is being referred to here is that the Object handles will be passed by their value in the index table. This is not saying that the objects are being passed by value. The result is quite the contrary. This new feature means that object handles will be passed by value and objects will be passed by reference.
Now PHP will be acting like a true OO language with this latest release. Objects behaving like objects will now benefit the end users, by providing better overall functionality of the application. This means application will run faster and the problems in relation to object orientation are reduced substantially. This means that large applications will be more coherent and more organised, easier to maintain and extend upon.
To assist PHP 5.0 with its new OO philosophy, Zend 2.0 have offered new features like private member variables and methods, static variables and language level aggregation. PHP will now be able to interact with external component models, such as Java, COM/DCOM, and .Net.
This means that PHP will be able to work within a Java and .Net environment, since the components in these languages can be used transparently inside PHP, as if they were PHP components.
PHP 5.0 will use the same interface for all objects, including native objects. This ensures that all objects in the application (i.e. PHP objects and overloaded objects) will behave in a consistent manner.
If this wasn't enough to wet your appetite, PHP 5.0 will now have error handling capabilities so that your application can concisely inform the user of what the problem is, without all that cryptic error jargon and in a graceful manner, unlike previous versions.
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