Simon Willison’s Weblog

Zend Engine 2 alpha

14th June 2002

I don’t know how I missed this, but the PHP group have released an alpha version of PHP with the Zend Engine 2 (tarball / Windows binary). This is exciting stuff—the new scripting engine has vastly improved object support and brand new exception handling, something I’ve wanted in PHP for a long time. The CHANGELOG lists the new features and provides sample code. Here’s a summary:

• New Object Model—objects are dealt with by reference and no longer copied every time they are assigned or passed to a method.
• Private Members—classes can have private members, specified with the new private keyword.
• Object Cloning—via a new __clone() method.
• Forced deletion of objects—via the new delete statement.
• Nested classes (namespaces)
• Unified Constructors—constriuctors can now be declared as __construct() rather than using the name of the class.
• Destructors—specified with __destruct().
• Exceptions—including try, throw and catch blocks.
• Dereferencing objects returned from functions—now you can use code like this: ('bar')->method();
• Static member variables of static classes can now be initialized.
• Parameters that are passed by reference to a function may now have default values.
• Built-In Backtracing—the debug_backtrace() returns an array of previously called functions, along with their file and line number.

It’s all good, but it comes with a hefty warning against using the alpha on even semi-production web sites. Personally I can’t wait for a deployable version.