What's New in November 2024: PHP 8.4, Blender 4.3, Angular v19, and More Releases

November 2024 brings significant updates to several key technologies, offering valuable benefits for developers, designers, and IT professionals. This digest focuses on the most interesting and significant releases that can improve your work.

Explore the enhanced capabilities of PHP 8.4, making this language even more powerful for web application development. Wireshark 4.4.2 continues to impress network administrators and engineers with bug fixes and feature upgrades.

In the graphics domain, Blender 4.3 introduces fresh tools for 3D modeling and animation, while the preview of Android 16 invites developers to offer feedback for refinement. Finally, Angular v19 rolls out a series of updates designed to optimize web applications and enhance the developer experience.

New Features of PHP 8.4

November marked the release of PHP 8.4, bringing significant updates and changes that expanded the language’s capabilities and improved performance. By the way, we recently blogged about PHP's importance in development.

A standout feature is the implementation of the JIT compiler based on the IR Framework. This innovation enables the generation of an intermediate representation (IR), which is then optimized and converted into machine instructions for the target platform. This approach ensures more efficient code compilation and execution.

Another key addition is the support for property hooks, enabling developers to attach custom logic to property access or modification without intercepting read and write operations. This simplifies property management and reduces boilerplate code.

PHP 8.4 also introduces a cleaner syntax for referencing methods in new expressions without separating parentheses, making code more concise and readable.

To improve flexibility and security, asymmetric property visibility is now supported. Developers can separately define access rights for write (set) and read (get) operations, providing more granular control.

The new version also adds support for lazy objects, which are only initialized upon first use. This optimizes performance and reduces memory consumption.

For those working with HTML5, PHP 8.4 introduces the \Dom\HTMLDocument class, ensuring proper markup parsing. The new request_parse_body() function simplifies handling HTTP requests with multipart/form-data content type.

Finally, PDO (PHP Data Objects) has been enhanced with support for creating SQL parsers and driver-specific subclasses, offering more robust database management capabilities and improved performance.

These updates solidify PHP’s position as a versatile and efficient choice for modern web development.

Wireshark 4.4.2 Release

Wireshark 4.4.2, released at the end of November, is the second update in the 4.4.4 series, featuring several critical bug fixes and many other improvements.

Let's go over the fixes:

• Resolved a crash that occurred when loading PCAP files containing packets with invalid CRCs.
• Fixed an issue causing crashes during CSV data export.
• Corrected a bug where packets with encrypted data were displayed incorrectly.
• Addressed errors in handling fragmented IP packets.
• Fixed incorrect start and end time displays for sessions in the statistics window.

And now for the improvements! The latest update improves I/O graphs, TCP flows, and VoIP call visualization. Significant changes have been made to the user interfaces and dialogs to make the tools easier to utilize. The TShark syntax has been updated to output only fields with a specific prefix: instead of -G fields prefix, -G fields,prefix is now used. This change brings back the ability to specify a configuration profile with tshark -G fields.

Additionally, Wireshark 4.4.2 offers extended protocol support for ARTNET, ASN.1 PER, BACapp, HTTP/2, IEEE 802.11, ZigBee ZCL, and more. Support for BLF file format has also been added, broadening the scope of data analysis.

The New Blender 4.3

Blender 4.3 introduces a range of improvements across its features. EEVEE, the real-time rendering engine, now supports light and shadow linking—a function previously exclusive to Cycles—providing greater control over scene lighting. EEVEE passes are also available for interactive compositing, enabling the creation of complex NPR setups and effects directly within the 3D viewport.

The Shader Editor gains a new Metallic BSDF node, simplifying the creation of metallic materials by combining previously complex configurations into a single, easy-to-use node. In addition, a new Gabor noise texture node offers procedural noise generation with controllable stripe direction and width, ideal for advanced texturing needs.

The eraser tool has been redesigned to "cut" strokes rather than simply removing points. It now accurately resolves intersections with the edge of the eraser, creating new points on the stroke for a more refined workflow.

The Grease Pencil engine has been completely rewritten, eliminating long-standing limitations and introducing a third-generation version designed for improved performance. Grease Pencil data now integrates smoothly with geometry nodes, enabling layer-by-layer editing with curves and custom attributes. Updated nodes ensure seamless handling of Grease Pencil data across projects.

For UV mapping, Blender 4.3 introduces a new iterative unwrapping method called "Minimum Stretch." This method uses the SLIM (Scalable Local Injective Mappings) algorithm to reduce distortion through iterative refinements. According to the release page, it's particularly effective for organic shapes.

Lastly, a new Fill Gradient tool is available in Edit Mode, located under the interpolation tool. This allows users to manipulate material-based fill gradients by selecting and dragging them, offering a more intuitive way to achieve precise gradient effects.

Thanks to these innovations, the workflow is greatly improved:

• The Blender Extensions platform continues to grow with hundreds of free add-ons and themes that allow you to customize your workflows endlessly.
• The "For Each Element" loop zone makes it easier to iterate through elements of geometry in parallel, making repetitive processes easier to handle.
• New service nodes such as Hash Value, Integer Math, and Warning Node have been added.
• Widgets have been added to node groups. This means you can edit node tree inputs directly in the 3D view window—no need to dive into the node editor or modifier stack.
• The new ability to organize layers into layer groups makes it easy to toggle visibility, locking, and onion peeling for all layers in a group.
• Portable installation, new environment variables, and custom packaging simplify the integration of Blender 4.3 extensions into studio pipelines.
• A new Set Geometry Name node makes it easy to assign names to geometries. Its automatic initialization is based on object and collection names.

It's really impressive how many possibilities the new Blender 4.3 will bring to game developers and designers.

Android 16 Developer Preview

In November 2024, Google unveiled the first developer preview of Android 16, now available for testing. This version focuses on performance improvements and enhanced security. Firmware builds are prepared for Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6/6a/6 Pro, Pixel 7/7a/7 Pro, Pixel 8/8a/8 Pro, Pixel 9/9 Pro/9 Pro XL/9 Pro Fold, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet.

The key features of Android 16 Developer Preview 1 include a built-in interface that grants apps access only to user-selected photos and videos. Apps are no longer permitted to access the entire media library, giving users greater control over their personal data.

Additionally, the Health Connect data storage, designed for fitness trackers and other wearable devices, now includes a new API that supports medical records in the FHIR format. This feature ensures that user consent is mandatory before any app interacts with such sensitive data.

Android 16 also introduces technologies from the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to improve ad delivery within mobile apps while enhancing privacy protections. This marks a significant step toward maintaining user privacy in app-based advertising.

If you're interested in testing Android 16, the first preview is available for download. Google welcomes developer feedback to help refine the system’s stability and performance in upcoming updates.

Angular v19 Release

Angular v19 introduces several enhancements designed to simplify web application development. This release focuses on performance improvements, an enhanced developer experience, and a more modular component architecture.

One of the standout features is incremental hydration, a technique that allows components to be lazily loaded and hydrated. This greatly improves the perceived performance of server-rendered applications, especially large-scale web apps with long initial load times.

The new event replay feature enhances user experience by capturing and replaying user events during the initial page load. This eliminates the lag between user interaction and the code availability required to handle those events.

Angular v19 also introduces route-level rendering modes, giving developers more control over how individual routes are rendered. Developers can now precisely configure server-side, pre-rendered, or client-side rendering for each route.

For developers, Angular v19 offers numerous quality-of-life improvements:

• Hot Module Replacement (HMR) for styles is now enabled by default, with experimental support for templates available via a flag, accelerating the development process.
• The Angular CLI now identifies unused imported components in standalone components and includes an auto-remove feature. Components marked as standalone, introduced in Angular v14, now default to standalone: true, simplifying metadata for components, directives, and pipes. This change is automatically applied during project updates.
• Templates now support local variable declarations, making the codebase more concise. Additionally, several new optional APIs have been added, and key reactivity APIs have been stabilized.

Both Angular Material and the CDK have seen notable updates. These include a redesigned theming API for creating custom themes using a single mixin, support for two-dimensional drag-and-drop in the CDK, and a new time picker component with improved accessibility.

For a comprehensive overview of the new features, visit the official Angular blog.

Have a great month, and we’ll see you for the next is*hosting digest!