Just before the weekend the PHP team announced the official release of PHP 5.6.0. The new version brings about a slew of awesome new features with it, and some of you have already taken advantage of them through the early installs of bugfix versions of PHP 5.6.0 on the Rapid Purple Hosting servers. This install has now been updated to the full release version of PHP 5.6.0.
For those of you who haven’t, the main features of PHP 5.6.0 are:
- Constant scalar expressions – numeric and string literals and/or constants are now allowed in static-value contexts, such as constant and property declarations or default function arguments
- Variadic functions and argument unpacking using the ‘…’ operator – the variadic functions can now be implemented through the ‘…’ operator instead of the func_get_args() function
- Exponentiation using the ** operator – a right-associative ** operator and a **= shorthand assignment operator have been added to support exponentiation
- Function and constant importing with the use keyword -the use operator now supports importing functions (via the use function construct) and constants (via the use const construct), apart from classes
- A phpdbg debugger -PHP now includes an interactive debugger called phpdbg, which is implemented as a SAPI module
- php://input is now reusable and allows for reading raw data from the request body
- $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated
- GMP objects now support operator overloading
- Large file uploads – file uploads larger than 2 GB are now accepted
Check out the full list of new features in 5.6.0. If you use PHP 5.5 or any older version of PHP and want to upgrade to the new 5.6.0 release, you can do so seamlessly with a click from the PHP configuration section of the Rapid Purple Web Hosting Control Panel.