The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

Among the list of new features/improvements are things like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions, closures, support for mysqlnd and removal of support for pre-Windows 2000 systems. For more information on when the full stable version will his the web, check out the release plan.

This weekend I wrapped up a few small tests and sent the patch in and it was subsequently pushed to php 5.3 and php 6.0. Now, this is not at all the way I wanted things to work, in all honesty I think the patch is pretty hokey but unfortunately nobody really spoke up in support of the changes I wanted to make to parent:: in regards to LSB.

His example shows how to override a static method and push that new method's execution to the parent class (in two ways - safe using forward_static_call and the not so safe calling itself with a parent:: override).

Short list of what you can find there: Namespaces, __callstatic() magic method, accessing static members through $foo::myFunc(), fully rewritten ini-parser with .htaccess-like user defined ini files for CGI/FastCGI, improved OpenSSL extension, PCRE 7.4, and other fixes and improvements that will never get into 5_2 branch.

He recommends teching throughly before the major release to find all of the bug before the general public does. Builds for both source and Windows systems have been posted.

I won't rehash all of the arguments as you can quite easily find out my full thoughts by previous posts and on that mailing list thread. To put it simply I feel that somehow there needs to be a way to call methods in a parent class without losing the ability to reference back to the original called static.

He gives an example of what he's talking about (code) and, to help further his cause he's created three patches to make it work how he'd like.

In the second part we will deal with static late binding, which is a very exciting new feature in PHP 5.3 and which promise some really nifty code. :) This topic attracted attention after Zend Framework. There was a little outcry in the PHP blogosphere, that the ActiveRecord examples presented in this webcast can't work in PHP even with the version 5.2. Now with late static binding it is possible to implement this style of ActiveRecord almost correctly.

His post is an example of implementing the ActiveRecord (sort of) pattern, complete with code examples.

In my previous post I mentioned that PHP 5.3 will be released in early 2008 so I think it's just in time to talk about the features of this version. [...] The big gun features are namespaces, late static binding and mysqlnd, but there are other interesting improvements, for example __callStatic, dynamic static calls. In this part of this series we are going to analyze namespaces in detail.

Included in the post are a "before" and "after" example of namspacing in a PHP application, code examples of namespaces in action, simple porting of current PHP 5.2 applications up to 5.3 and working with __autoload and Reflection.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

Included in his list of updates are things like: namespaces, late static binding, the __callStatic magic method and the mysql native driver (mysqlnd). He also recommends that, if you're currently running something in the PHP 5.2.x series, you update to the latest on that before making the jump to PHP 5.3 when it comes out.