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After years of anticipation, PHP 5 was released today. This release represents a milestone in the evolution of PHP. It sports the new Zend Engine II, a completely re-worked object model, and many many new features.

As an aside, the PHP developers have decided to make SQLite, a light file-based database engine, the default session handler. Even with all file locking turned off, this is at least 4 times slower than the current system used by PHP 4. Of course you can change this setting back to flat session files, but the fact this is their default should say something about other decisions they've made. This setting itself makes especially no sense to me, as all session variables go into the $_SESSION superglobal as associative array keys - there is absolutely no benefit to using a database-enabled flat file for this, as opposed to a regular flat file. It's as if the PHP group were excited about sqlite and tried shoving it into everything.

They also changed the object inheritance rules so that overloaded child methods have to have the exact same number of parameters as the original class. So, now you can't have multiple constructors *or* have child constructors that assume certain values and reduce the amount of paramters accordingly.