PHP: PHP 4.2.0 Release Announcement

After an orderly QA process, PHP 4.2.0 is out!
[ Version Française ]

External variables

The biggest change in PHP 4.2.0 concerns variable handling. External variables (from the environment, the HTTP request, cookies or the web server) are no longer registered in the global scope by default. The preferred method of accessing these external variables is by using the new Superglobal arrays, introduced in PHP 4.1.0. More information about this change:

Compatibility

The Apache Software Foundation recently released their first General Availability version of Apache 2. PHP 4.2.0 will have EXPERIMENTAL support for this version. You can build a DSO module for Apache 2 with --with-apxs2. We do not recommend that you use this in a production environment.

PHP 4.2.0 still lacks certain key features on Mac OS X and Darwin, and isn't officially supported by the PHP Group on these platforms. Specifically, building PHP as a dynamically loaded Apache module isn't supported at this time. PHP 4.3.0, due to be released in August, 2002, will be the first PHP release to officially support Mac OS X. It, along with future Mac OS X and Apache releases, will enable full feature parity with other PHP platforms. Update: Instructions on overcoming these limitations

Improvements

PHP 4.2.0 includes several improvements:

External variables (from the environment, the HTTP request, cookies or the web server) are no longer registered as global variables
Overhaul of the sockets extension
Highly improved performance with file uploads
The satellite and mailparse extensions were moved to PECL and are no longer bundled with the official PHP release
The posix extension has been cleaned up
iconv handling has been improved
Output buffering support, which was introduced in PHP 4.1.0 has been stabilized
Improved performance and stability of the domxml extension
New multibyte regular expression support
LOTS of fixes and new functions

For a full list of changes in PHP 4.2.0, see the ChangeLog.