14 DAY TRIAL // PHP 5.6.0 Alpha 2, an HTML-embedded scripting language with syntax borrowed from C, Java, and Perl, is now available for testing.
PHP 5.x includes a new OOP model based on the Zend Engine 2.0, a new extension for improved MySQL support, built-in native support for SQLite, and a lot of other features.
According to the changelog, peer certificates are now verified by default when connecting to SSL/TLS servers, an exponentiation operator has been added, and the output encoding handling has been simplified by using the default_charset as the default character encoding.
A new Alpha version should become available by the end of the month. You can check out the official changelog in the readme file incorporated in the source package for more details about this release, or on the official website. Download PHP 5.6.0 Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.