Download PHP 5 RC1

The PHP development team has released the first release candidate of version 5. Many new features and better OOP support have been added to this. Anyone who wants to try out this version can feel free to do so. The PHP 5 RC1 release notes look like this:

The first Release Candidate of PHP 5 is finally here! The move from Beta stage to RC stage means that PHP 5 is now feature complete, and is quite stable – stable enough for everyone to start playing with. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

• The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library.
• A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL’s new features, such as prepared statements.
• SQLite has been bundled with PHP.
• A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
• A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
• Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.
• And lots more…

For changes since Beta 4, please consult the ChangeLog†[break]The following downloads are available:
PHP 5.0.0RC1 (tar.bz2) (4447KB)
PHP 5.0.0RC1 (tar.gz) (5449KB)
PHP 5.0.0RC1 zip package (7508KB)
Collection of PECL modules for PHP 5.0.0RC1 (407KB)