PHP 4.0 Release Candidate 1

After about 9 months of public beta testing, PHP 4.0 has gone out of the beta cycle, and a release candidate (RC1) is now available. This version of PHP is considered release-quality code, and unless outstanding problems are found in it, the final release version of PHP 4.0 will come out on early April. All new users of PHP should now use PHP 4.0, and legacy users of PHP 3.0 can feel safe to begin migrating to the new version. There haven't been too many important changes between PHP 4.0 Beta 4 and PHP 4.0 RC1. The most notable change is that the MySQL client library is now bundled in the PHP distribution, and every build of PHP now supports connecting to MySQL servers without the need of any additional code (you would obviously have to have a MySQL server to which you'd connect). A full list of changes between Beta 4 and Release Candidate 1 is enclosed. The new version is available from http://www.php.net/downloads.php Zeev 27 March 2000, Version 4.0 Release Candidate 1 - Fixed a data corruption bug in mysql_result(), if used in table.fieldname mode (Zeev) - Fixed a crash problem in func_num_args(), func_get_arg() and func_get_args() when used as function arguments (Andi) - Added get_class_methods(string classname) function. (Andrei) - Don't default to iso-8859-1 since this confuses some browsers (Rasmus) - stristr() no longer modifies it's arguments. (Thies) - Make it possible to specify both a port and a socket in mysql_[p]connect (Rasmus) - Added --disable-pic for disabling generating PIC for shared objects on platforms which support it (i.e. Linux) (Sascha) - serialize()/unserialize() now call __sleep() and __wakeup() when working on objects. (Thies) - renamed to_string() method to __string_value() for consistency. (Thies, Zend library) - Fixed a bug in the third argument to define() - Added is_numeric() that returns true if the argument is a number or a numeric string. (Andrei) - domxml now supports libxml 2.0 Beta and drops support for older versions, due to massive changes in libxml - fixed possible crash in unserialize() if serialized data was corrupted. (Thies) - Changed $HTTP_STATE_VARS to $HTTP_SESSION_VARS. Use only the latter version now! (Andrei) - Add GD-JPEG Support (Rasmus) - Prevent from loading dynamic PHP modules which were compiled with different debug and thread safety modes than PHP, which resulted in a crash (Andi) - connection_aborted() and friends work again. (Thies) - Added include_once() and require_once() functionality (Andi, Zend library) - Removed support for pdflib < 3.0 (Uwe) - Added auto-registration of everything in $HTTP_SESSION_VARS[] if register_globals is turned off. (Andrei) - Cleaned up extension namespace (Stig) - OCINLogon() sessions are now closed again. (Thies) - Added ip2long() and long2ip(), courtesy of Faisal Nasim <faisal@nasim.org> (Andrei) - Added ftruncate() and fstat(), courtesy of Faisal Nasim <faisal@nasim.org> (Andrei) - Added parse_ini_file(). Currently implemented in non thread safe version of PHP, and currently lacks section support (Zeev) - "none" is now equivalent with "" in Apache config directives (Stig) - OCINLogon no longer crashes. (Thies) - Fix comparisons of (string) "nan" with (string) "nan". (Thies, Zend library) - Switched back to the old $HTTP_*_VARS[] behavior - $HTTP_GET_VARS["foo"] and $foo are no longer references to each other, but separate variables like they were prior to PHP 4.0 Beta 4 (Zeev) - Fixed Sybase-DB compilation (Zeev) - Fixed a (fairly common) situation where error_reporting values would not be properly restored after a call to error_reporting(), in between requests (Zeev) - The various $HTTP_*_VARS[] are now protected, and cannot be manipulated by user input (Zeev) - Added ini_set() as an alias to ini_alter() (Zeev) - The string None is now recognized as a keyword by the php.ini processor, and can be used to denote an empty string (Zeev) - Added get_class_vars(string class_name) and get_object_vars(object obj) functions. (Andrei, Zend library) - Add pdf_set_parameter(), pdf_skew(), pdf_show_boxed() (Uwe) - Fixed comparison of (string) "inf" with (string) "inf", which was erroneously returning false (Zeev) - Implemented default_charset and default_mimetype config directives (Stig) - Ported T1lib support from PHP3. (Jouni) - Fixed -DEAPI inheritance from APXS. (Sascha) - Fixed possible crash in module-shutdown. (Thies) - Fixed safe_mode_protected_env_vars INI directive (Zeev) - Fixed getrusage() (Sascha) - Fixed OCI8 crash when returning cursors from stored-procedures. (Thies) -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/