PHP6: What about the Future of PHP?
PHP is good, is fast and reliable is perfect for me. What I don’t like abut PHP is the modification of commands when it moves from a version to other. But I think I should be quiet because everything in life is changing. Now we a have a new version of PHP (Version 6) and I feel we are moving to a different tendency with new features, some improvements that should make us the life easier.
PHP6 is bringing to us a very important feature (Unicode Support) which means that PHP6 will operate with better results internationally. There are some websites developed in previous versions of PHP that doesn’t support Unicode for diverse French and Spanish characters but with PHP6 you will be able to overcome each obstacle. The (UTF) which stands for Unicode Transformation Format determine a way to encode characters for Unicode.
Another new feature is “namespaces” which can help you to create class names that someone else is able to use. Also you won’t have to modify your application code because any PHP code you have written without namespaces will run perfectly.
As a general purpose application, I personally think that the future of PHP is focused in the best features running under the web 2.0. The syntax difference between previous visions of PHP and PHP6 will depend on what kind of scripts and syntax you use in your web applications.
Talking About SOAP:
The Simple Objects Access Protocol is used for exchange XML-based over network computers. SOAP is the facilitator that makes possible the interoperability of different platforms. The SOAP extensions introduced in PHP5 remains in PHP6 but now are disabled by default and you have to enable the extension for use it.
PHP6 and XML:
PHP6 promises significant improvements in the “XMLreader” and “XMLwriter” which are very useful for your applications in PHP using XML. These classes let your read and write XML without any complication.
Dead Features of PHP:
There is a short list of features which have been removed in previous versions of PHP. These features are: “magic_quotes”, “register_globals”. “register_long_arrays” and “safe_mode”.
Conclusions:
There are several improvements applied to PHP6 and other features are now dead and have been removed from previous versions. We can see that PHP continue being ahead in the realm of web developing applications. It is important start trying with this new version of PHP in order you can test yourself if you application is not affected by changes.
