PHP is the most popular open source, rich featured and high level web application development language, which is supported by various databases and hosting servers. The PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripting language is widely used by developers for creating complex and high level web applications.
PHP has rich features and it can be embedded with the HTML in order to create more dynamic application for web. Recently, PHP has released the latest version of PHP 'PHP 5.4.23' that can be downloaded free of cost from the official website of PHP: www.php.net.
In the latest version, PHP have fixed 10 bugs including security issue in OpenSSL module (CVE-2013-6420). Every latest version of PHP aimed to enable PHP developers to create more dynamic web pages quickly and easily. The Hypertext Preprocessor or PHP is basically based upon the concept of Java, C, C++ and other object oriented programming languages.
PHP 5.4.23 Features
- HTTP authentication with PHP: Using the authentication feature in PHP, user can be authenticated before login to the application. You can authenticate a user by asking for a valid Username/Password in input window. This features of PHP makes a PHP web application more secure.
- Cookies: PHP also provides the feature of storing data. The Cookies, in PHP are a mechanism that can be used for storing data in the remote browser. A PHP developer can used cookies to track and identify returned users easily. PHP offers various functions like setcookie() or setrawcookie() to handle the cookies.
- Sessions: The feature of Session management in PHP preserves important data and helps in creating more customized application. There are several methods in PHP to get, set and manage the session. for example ' session_start, session_cache_expire, session_destroy, session_name,session_unset and session_register_shutdown ' etc.
- Dealing with XForms: In the latest version of PHP, developers have a more advance of dealing with XForms.
- Handling file uploads: The latest version of PHP provides a number of ways for handling and uploading files. These methods includes POST method uploads, Error Messages Explained, Common Pitfalls and uploading multiple files.
- Using remote files: This features provides an interface between your web application and various servers that allows to use remote files in PHP. You can use this feature once the 'allow_url_fopen' is enabled in 'php.ini' file.
- Connection handling: There are different states of any connection in PHP application, which is internally handled by the PHP server. These states could be different from normal to aborted and timeout. The connection handling in PHP allows you to handle all such connection status.
Apart from the ongoing features, PHP 5.4.23 features also includes features like Persistent Database Connections, Safe Mode, Command line usage, Garbage Collection and DTrace Dynamic Tracing etc.
All these PHP 5.4.23 features makes the PHP more secure and reliable scripting language.
Details of bugs fixed in the latest version of PHP 'PHP 5.4.23'.
Core:
Fixed bug #66094 (unregister_tick_function tries to cast a Closure to a string).
Fixed bug #65947 (basename is no more working after fgetcsv in certain
situation).
JSON:
Fixed whitespace part of #64874 ("json_decode handles whitespace and
case-sensitivity incorrectly").
MySQLi:
Fixed bug #66043 (Segfault calling bind_param() on mysqli).
mysqlnd:
Fixed bug #66124 (mysqli under mysqlnd loses precision when bind_param with 'i').
Fixed bug #66141 (mysqlnd quote function is wrong with NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES
after failed query).
OpenSSL:
Fixed memory corruption in openssl_x509_parse() (CVE-2013-6420). (Stefan Esser).
PDO:
Fixed bug #65946 (sql_parser permanently converts values bound to strings).