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The main novelty is in the PHP4 language interpreter PHP. Thanks to Zend, developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, there have been increases of between 5 and 10 times the speed performance of PHP pages. This performance has put him ahead of ASP, the tencología of Microsoft, which will allow ASP to directly compete with Microsoft's platform. The development platform Apache + PHP on Microsoft environments and is achieving higher returns than IIS + ASP, so that increasing its use on these platforms seem very likely. This will mean that in future the developer on NT platforms, for example, is not obliged to use IIS + ASP to develop web systems, as had happened so far. On the other hand, PHP to date was designed basically for Apache. It was the only one that had support for PHP as a server module. All other web servers could only use PHP as a cgi. In PHP4 support has been added to the Apache API, the Netscape (NSAPI), support for ISAPI (Internet Explorer API) and the API server AOL. In this way all these servers can achieve performance similar to Apache in its implementation of PHP.

Besides the increase in performance with respect to the support of objects in PHP, the overhead of objects has been improved. This has added the possibility of polymorphic methods, since methods as reference to an object are called to behave one way or another. This feature is very important to include support to access COM and CORBA architectures.

Another new feature is that PHP4 can be compiled to support threads, something that was not possible in PHP3. The main advantage we can get from this feature is the use of libraries that use threads. And in most implementations of CORBA that is true. Maybe go and little time before they can access the CORBA world from PHP.

For the developer to include a debugger PHP4 so we will avoid many headaches with PHP. We can continue to further these mysterious errors that occur in these languages tipados little. The PHP interpreter is capable of releasing the resources reserved automatically so we can forget free. Yes, this is something similar to the Java garbage collector. We will have to do tests to see that this works because in the case of Java, is most often of the headaches you save. In reference [2] can be accessed by a report by Javier Carretero on PHP4, the most complete I've found online.