PHP 5.3.0 Released

The PHP development team have just announced 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. 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.

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