I usually hear about this sort of thing through an announcment list or one of the PHP feeds I follow, but instead I was just pleaseantly surprised to visit the home page of php.net this evening and learn that PHP 5.1.3 is out.

Some particularly nice-looking benefits in this release include the removal of deprecation warnings for the ‘var’ keyword in class properties under E_STRICT, and the overhauled FastCGI interface. Of course, the most important benefits are the collection of stability refinements and bug fixes.

Timing is perfect from my perspective on the FastCGI overhaul, as I’m looking forward to really digging into the lighttpd/PHP 5 FastCGI combination this month.  I know this topic has come up before a number of times, and many people have made the switch … so, I’m planning to give it a whirl as well. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who’s already made the switch to hear if the FastCGI rewrite in PHP 5.1.3 makes a noticable performance difference.

E STRICT, fastcgi, lighttpd, php 5