[Ben]

Nach einer Reihe von release candidates wurde nun offiziell die PHP Version 5.2.1 veröffentlicht.

Die Version bringt eine Reihe von Bugfixes mit sich und natürlich auch eine gut gefüllte Liste von Verbesserungen und Neuerungen.

• Added CURLOPT_TCP_NODELAY constant to Curl extension. (Sara)
• Added support for hex numbers of any size. (Matt)
• Added function stream_socket_shutdown(). It is a wrapper for system shutdown() function, that shut downs part of a full-duplex connection. (Dmitry)
• Added internal heap protection (Dmitry)
  • memory-limit is always enabled (--enable-memory-limit removed)
  • default value if memory-limit is set to 128M
  • safe unlinking
  • cookies
  • canary protection (debug build only)
  • random generation of cookies and canaries
• Added forward support for 'b' prefix in front of string literals. (Andrei)
• Added three new functions to ext/xmlwriter (Rob, Ilia)
  • xmlwriter_start_dtd_entity()
  • xmlwriter_end_dtd_entity()
  • xmlwriter_write_dtd_entity()
• Added a meta tag to phpinfo() output to prevent search engines from indexing the page. (Ilia)
• Added new function, sys_get_temp_dir(). (Hartmut)
• Added missing object support to file_put_contents(). (Ilia)
• Added support for md2, ripemd256 and ripemd320 algos to hash(). (Sara)
• Added forward support for (binary) cast. (Derick)
• Added optimization for imageline with horizontal and vertical lines (Pierre)
• Removed dependency from SHELL32.DLL. (Dmitry)
• Removed double "wrong parameter count" warnings in various functions. (Hannes)
• Moved extensions to PECL:
  • ext/informix (Derick, Tony)
• Changed double-to-string utilities to use BSD implementation. (Dmitry, Tony)
• Updated bundled libcURL to version 7.16.0 in the Windows distro. (Edin)
• Updated timezone database to version 2006.16. (Derick)
• cgi.* and fastcgi.* directives are moved to INI subsystem. The new directive cgi.check_shebang_line can be used to omitting check for "#! /usr/bin/php" line. (Dmitry).
• Improved proc_open(). Now on Windows it can run external commands not through CMD.EXE. (Dmitry)
• VCWD_REALPATH() is improved to use realpath cache without VIRTUAL_DIR. (Dmitry)
• ext/bcmath initialization code is moved from request startup to module startup. (Dmitry)
• Zend Memory Manager Improvements (Dmitry)
  • use HeapAlloc() instead of VirtualAlloc()
  • use "win32" storage manager (instead of "malloc") on Windows by default
• Zip Extension Improvements (Pierre)
  • Fixed leak in statName and stateIndex
  • Fixed return setComment (Hannes)
  • Added addEmptyDir method
• Filter Extension Improvements (Ilia, Pierre)
  • Fixed a bug when callback function returns a non-modified value.
  • Added filter support for $_SERVER in cgi/apache2 sapis.
  • Make sure PHP_SELF is filtered in Apache 1 sapi.
  • Fixed bug #39358 (INSTALL_HEADERS contains incorrect reference to php_filter.h).
  • Added "default" option that allows a default value to be set for an invalid or missing value.
  • Invalid filters fails instead of returning unsafe value
  • Fixed possible double encoding problem with sanitizing filters
  • Make use of space-strict strip_tags() function
  • Fixed whitespace trimming
  • Added support for FastCGI environment variables. (Dmitry)
• PDO_MySQL Extension Improvements (Ilia)
  • Enabled buffered queries by default.
  • Enabled prepared statement emulation by default.
• Small optimization of the date() function. (Matt,Ilia)
• Optimized the internal is_numeric_string() function. (Matt,Ilia)
• Optimized array functions utilizing php_splice(). (Ilia)
• Windows related optimizations (Dmitry, Stas)
  • COM initialization/deinitialization are done only if necessary
  • removed unnecessary checks for ISREG file and corresponding stat() calls
  • opendir() is reimplementation using GetFistFile/GetNextFile those are faster then _findfirst/_findnext
  • implemented registry cache that prevent registry lookup on each request. In case of modification of corresponding registry-tree PHP will reload it automatic
  • start timeout thread only if necessary
  • stat() is reimplementation using GetFileAttributesEx(). The new implementation is faster then implementation in MS VC CRT, but it doesn't support Windows 95.
• Streams optimization (Dmitry)
  • removed unnecessary ftell() calls (one call for each included PHP file)
  • disabled calls to read() after EOF

Eine Übersicht über alle Änderungen findet man im offiziellen Changelog.

Ilia Alshanetsky schreibt in seinem Blog

Not only will the security of your setup increase, but the stability and the performance of your PHP will improve as well.

Demnach viel Erfolg beim Update auf diese Version, welche wie immer über die offizielle Downloadseite von php.net bezogen werden kann.

Nachtrag:
http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_1.php

http://www.php.net/#4

[Ben]

Und noch ein Link:
http://killersoft.com/randomstrings/...why-not-php-5/

Meiner Ansicht nach sehr lesenswert. Auch wenn er recht kurz ist.