In a new post Gonzalo Ayuso talks about some of the new features in the recently released PHP 5.4 alpha, including some code examples.

We already have the php5.4 alpha ready for testing. This new release has a few features that I really like. The lack of those features gave me problems in the past. Because of that, I'm very excited waiting for the new stable release of PHP 5.4.

There's several features included in the release, but he spotlights some of the major ones - support for array dereferencing, indirect method calls through arrays, reintroduction of using "$this" in closures and traits support.