All of you PHP followers (and gurus out there), this is the moment you've been waiting for! According to the main PHP.net site, the Beta of PHP 5.0.0 has been released.

The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Both source packages, and a Windows build are available in the Downloads Section. A list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog file. Some of the more major changes include:

• PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2. For a list of Zend Engine 2 changes, please visit this webpage.
• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
• SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website.
• Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.

Due to issues surrounding the MySQL 4.0 license, the MySQL are no longer bundled with PHP. For more information on these licensing changes, please refer to the MySQL Licensing Policy.

So, all of you ugraders out there, get busy and get this latest release and get busy testing! The closer we get to finding and fixing the bugs, the sooner we get this new system!