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PHP 5 is released. Lots of exciting new features, many described in Zend’s PHP 5 In Depth. The new XML support based on libxml2, HTML Tidy support built in, and most of all the new object model are the most interesting changes to me. Go get it.

Slashdot has a story on it, but for some reason they’ve emphasized a new closed-source PHP compiler from a third party. This was a mistake, because now the comments are mostly about the price of the compiler and confused questions about how PHP is actually used. For the interested, compiling to bytecode for the speed boost is interesting for most PHP users and for that we have the Zend Accelerator and Turck MMCache. Compiling to native binaries is intriguing, but, like Perl and other interpreted languages, mostly a side note. The real news is PHP 5.