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CHAPTER 1 • INTRODUCING PHPwww.it-ebooks.infoexisting functionality and added several features commonly associated with mature programminglanguage architectures:Vastly improved object-oriented capabilities: Improvements to PHP’s objectorientedarchitecture were version 5’s most visible feature. Version 5 includednumerous functional additions such as explicit constructors and destructors,object cloning, class abstraction, variable scope, and interfaces, and a majorimprovement regarding how PHP handles object management. Chapters 6 and 7offer thorough introductions to this topic.Try/catch exception handling: Devising error-handling strategies withinprogramming languages is, ironically, error-prone and inconsistent. To remedythis problem, version 5 added support for exception handling. Long a mainstay oferror management in many languages, such as C++, C#, Python, and Java,exception handling offers an excellent means for standardizing your errorreportinglogic. This convenient methodology is introduced in Chapter 8.Improved XML and Web Services support: As of version 5, XML support is basedon the libxml2 library; and a new and rather promising extension for parsing andmanipulating XML, known as SimpleXML, was introduced. In Chapter 20, I’llintroduce you to SimpleXML, in addition to discuss several other slick third-partyWeb Services extensions.Native support for SQLite: Always keen on providing developers with a multitudeof choices, support was added for the powerful yet compact SQLite database server(www.sqlite.org). SQLite offers a convenient solution for developers looking formany of the features found in some of the heavyweight database products withoutincurring the accompanying administrative overhead. Although previous editionsof this book devoted an entire chapter to SQLite, PHP 5.1 changed PHP’srelationship with SQLite by recommending PHP and SQLite integration occurusing the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension, which is introduced in Chapter 31.• Note The enhanced object-oriented capabilities introduced in PHP 5 resulted in an additional boost for thelanguage: it opened up the possibility for cutting-edge frameworks to be created using the language. Chapter 24covers one of the most popular frameworks available today, the Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com).With the release of version 5, PHP’s popularity hit what was at the time a historical high, havingbeen installed on almost 19 million domains, according to Netcraft. PHP was also by far the mostpopular Apache module, available on almost 54 percent of all Apache installations, according to Internetservices consulting firm E-Soft Inc. (www.securityspace.com).PHP 5.3Although officially a point release, PHP 5.3 is actually the most significant upgrade to the language sincethe release of 5.0. Heralding a powerful array of new features including namespaces, late static binding,lambda functions and closures, a new MySQL driver, and a variety of syntactical additions such as4