Overload

PHP 5.3 RC4 is out. PHP 5.3 adds a number of new features, including a native MySQL library, late static bindings, closures, goto, and namespaces. While these are all (with the exception of goto) very exciting improvements, I’m especially excited about closures. Ever since I started using Python on a regular basis to build stuff on App Engine, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with PHP’s lack of this basic feature. While writing anonymous functions in PHP will no doubt take some time to get used to (it feels far too elegant to be appropriate in my PHP code), I will no doubt be taking significant advantage of the ability as soon as PHP 5.3 is out.

Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before PHP has a final release done and I can start moving mine and my clients’ projects over to 5.3.

For the first time in a long time, web developers can be happy with one of Microsoft’s decisions. Today, they announced that IE8 will actually improve IE’s previous behavior by rendering web pages in standards-compliant mode by default instead of requiring a special IE-specific tag to force standards-compliant rendering.

Apparently someone at Microsoft has finally started to understand the benefits of true web standards and their superiority to Microsoft’s previous attempts at complying with “standards”. Well, at least that’s what I’d like to think, though it might just be wishful thinking. It’s probably far more likely that the good folks at Microsoft simply looked at recent events in Europe and realized that they didn’t have much of a choice. With the EU’s monstrous antitrust appetite likely to remain to haunt them for a while, they likely had more to gain by taking some steps to help their image as an open company than continuing their ridiculous attempts at creating their own web standards (or lack thereof).

No matter what the reason for the change, IE8 is great news for anyone in the web development community and puts us on a road for a truly standards-compliant web much more quickly than I had imagined. Ars technica is reporting that IE8 will be going into private beta immediately, so hopefully we can expect this improvement soon.