PHP 5.3.0

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

* Support for namespaces

* Late static binding

* Lambda Functions and Closures

* Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut "?:" and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()

* Under the hood performance improvements

* Optional garbage collection for cyclic references

* Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql

* Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms

* More consistent float rounding

* Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level

* Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)

* New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant

* Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

* Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling

* Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)

* Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf

* Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.0, see the ChangeLog.

Source

[Raa]

Cheers! That's a welcome update :D