To the delight of PHP hosting customers, the PHP development team has recently announced the release of one of the most awaited PHP versions, PHP 5.4. The new PHP 5.4 introduces a number of new features, improvements and bug fixes to ease website development and speed performance.
What’s new in PHP 5.4?
PHP 5.4 comes as a major advancement in the 5.x series, introducing a bunch of improvements that make it faster and smaller, resulting in better memory management and a dramatic optimization of the runtime. With PHP 5.4, users can expect up to 20% improvements in memory usage and performance. But that’s not all users can expect from the latest PHP version. PHP 5.4 brings new, streamlined language syntax, support for multibyte languages, cleaner code base due to the removal of multiple deprecated language features, and many other features and improvements.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key features of PHP 5.4.
Traits.
Traits is a new method that enables developers to reuse code. Also known as horizontal reuse/multiple inheritance, traits are similar to abstract classes and can contain any number of properties and methods. A class can then use any number of traits.
Simplified Array Syntax.
PHP 5.4 also comes with shorter array syntax. The new syntax includes square brackets instead of using the old array(…)construct. The short-array syntax makes viewing multi-dimensional arrays is much easier.
Built-in Web Server.
PHP 5.4 offers a built-in CLI web server which can be easily started from the command-line. The web server is intended for testing/debugging purposes, meaning that you no longer need a web server like Apache or IIS to test simple web applications.
In addition to these key features, there are other miscellaneous updates and improvements in PHP 5.4 including: callable type hint; <?= is always on regardless of how your short_open_tag ini option is set; support for $this in anonymous functions; class members access on instantiation; binary numbers can be declared and many other improvements.
Enjoy top PHP hosting from a reliable web hosting provider.
If you need web hosting with PHP and MySQL, ServerPoint.com is a reputable web host offering affordable hosting plans using the LAMP structure. We have multiple PHP versions available for our customers with PHP 5.4 support coming soon. Our current and future PHP web hosting customers that use our services to host their websites written in PHP will soon be able to take advantage of the new features and enhancements in PHP 5.4 to make website development faster, smoother and easier.