Since I did not like the text of the announcement that much, I wrote
the following:
We are happy and proud to announce the first Release Candidate for the
eagerly awaited first release, PHP 5.0.0, of PHP 5. More than two years
in the making, PHP 5 is the next "major release" in the successfull
history of PHP, the widely-used general-purpose scripting language that
is especially suited for Web Development.
This new version of PHP features both an improved object model and
new language constructs that help developers to apply the paradigm
of object-oriented programming to their projects. Another cornerstone
of this new version of PHP is the overhauled support for XML
technologies like the SimpleXML interface to XML documents, the
Document Object Model (DOM Level 3), the Simple API for XML (SAX 2),
XSL Transformations (XSLT 1.0), the Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP) for the consumption and development of Web Services.
PHP 5 includes an improved extension (MySQLi) for the development of
applications that leverage features offered by newer versions of MySQL
(MySQL 4.1 and MySQL 5.0, for instance). This includes support for
prepared statements and load-balancing and replication management.
PHP 5 bundles with SQLite an embeddable SQL database engine and thus
features SQL database access without the need to run a separate RDBMS
process, like MySQL or PostgreSQL, for instance.
This Release Candidate of PHP 5 is considered feature-complete and
stable and intended for wide-spread testing. It is, however, not yet
recommended for mission-critical use.
--
Sebastian Bergmann
http://sebastian-bergmann.de/ http://phpOpenTracker.de/
Das Buch zu PHP 5: http://professionelle-softwareentwicklung-mit-php5.de/