I have recently added PHP 5.5 as an option in the Hepsia Control Panel for all Rapid Purple Hosting users. It was released just a few days ago and the new version offers lots of new features. Here is a quick overview of the new features offered by PHP 5.5:
- generators and coroutines;
- the ‘finally’ keyword;
- a simplified password hashing API;
- support for constant array/string dereferencing;
- scalar class name resolution via ::class;
- support for using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions;
- support for non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach;
- support for list() constructs in foreach statements;
- the Zend OPcache extension for opcode caching;
- the GD library has been upgraded to version 2.1, adding new functions and improving existing functionality;
This is the first time that the Zend OPcache extension has been included in the PHP core. It significantly improves PHP’s performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. This way, PHP no longer needs to load and parse scripts again and again on each request. The full list of the changes offered by PHP 5.5 is available here
While PHP 5.5 is almost fully backwards compatible, there are a few things you should keep in mind before upgrading. There have been changes to the pack() and unpack() functions. Also, case insensitivity is no longer locale specific and PHP is no longer compatible with Windows XP and Windows 2003. You can see more information about PHP 5.5?s backwards compatibility here.
I have also updated the PHP 5.4 version in the Hepsia Control Panel for Rapid Purple Hosting users to PHP 5.4.15. The new version fixes 10 reported issues present in 5.4.14. Also, PHP 5.4.15 offers a libmagic library update – it now includes libmagic 5.14.