[textile]

So yes, “PHP 5.0.0”:http://www.php.net/ is just released. It could be the next step for world domination of web application. But when will people starts to thread the. “My host”:http://www.dsensehosting.net is now running PHP 4.3.5 and many I know are on 4.3.2. It is still early day, and all the implication of upgrading to 5.0.0 is still not understood properly, so I expect most admin to just upgrade to 4.3.8 (a big fix release) and stays there and wait/see. This is probably a minor version of thh “Apache 1.3/2.0”:http://httpd.apache.org/ story, with already 2 years since the first 2.0 release, the adoption ratio is still disappointing. (mainly because many things still won’t run on 2.x)

Ok, up there I was pretending to know what I was talking about. If it was nonsense, just shoot me, yah? 🙂 Otherwise, read on.

The thing people talk about a lot about PHP5 is the new “Zend Engine II”:http://www.zend.com/ , which I know nothing about. Two things that excite me, however, are the native support of “SQLite”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.sqlite.org/ , and the ability to fully compile a PHP application. (See “BinaryPHP”:http://binaryphp.sourceforge.net/) So now it even sets its foot outside the ring of web application.

Oh how sweet to think that one could just get some free hosting somewhere, and run all the amazing things that are made possible with PHP. Now that the database (SQLite) is just another file on the disk. And how easy it would be to switch host, just copy the directory over, and voila!

Of course the “SQL92 support”:http://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html is not complete, and probably never will be. But I’m sure keen develpers can get around it, may be sacrificing some performance along the way. But I feel it will be very well worth.

[more “history”:http://us4.php.net/history of PHP versions]