PHP 4.3.0 Released

aftk2 writes "PHP.Net has just reported the release of PHP 4.3.0. The update sports a unified method of handling files and sockets, a bundled GD library (for working with images), and finalizes PHP's command line interface. For other information, check out the ChangeLog."

That's great

[Karamchand]

Thanks go to the PHP team for all this great work!! :-)

It's a pity though that Apache 2 support is still experimental. I hope the Apache and the PHP team get the work done fast so that Apache 2 can spread faster! :)

Most needed feature for newbies......

[ShatteredDream]

Is better documentation. Like most CS students I got started with Java. The Javadocs are incredibly easy to read and learn Java from. The PHP docs are anything but easy to read by comparison. Thus far, the only PHP I've learned is from books and source code (it's pretty easy to pick out what most PHP functions do from source examples). Python suffers from a similar problem IMO. I've been trying to get started with a bit of XML parsing and tried Python first. It was a pain in the ass to figure out what classes were being returned by functions among other things.

I think OSS projects working on languages and libraries should commit to including comments like this to help newbies (especially if the language is dynamically typed) /*
function name:
input parameters:
return type:
purpose:
parameter 1: (purpose)
parameter 2: (purpose)
*/

Don't rush to install it on production servers

[compwiz]

As with all PHP .0 releases, be wary about installing this release on production servers, even though this release has gone through a lot more testing than usual. I know of at least a few annoying bugs which were not fixed before the 4.3.0 release, such as a memory leak in a string handling function, and the fact that all PHP error messages are output to the global Apache error log even if they're only supposed to be displayed on the page itself.
Also, I noticed that if you have older PHP3 classes lying around which mistakenly redeclare a function, the entire script which uses the class will now fail under 4.3.0, where it would not trigger an error under previous versions. This is not a bug, but beware of it since it could break older applications.

Re:Best New Feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, there's nothing more annoying and pathetic than people trying to learn new things and grow. Good to see you're leading the example against this dangerous movement.