On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted a guide to what's new in PHP 5.6, the upcoming release of the language.

It's been a while since the release of PHP 5.4, and new versions have been coming out faster and faster ever since. When 5.5 hit and introduced some unexpectedly great features, the PHP community breathed a sigh of relief and regained hope of a more dedicated, structured and smart core development. Whether or not we'll actually get this remains to be seen, but the future does indeed look promising, especially if one looks at the PHP 5.6 changes made so far.

He goes through the list of things (so far) that will be in the upcoming release:

• MIME types in the CLI web server
• Internal Operator Overloading
• Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted
• POST data memory usage decreased
• Improved syntax for variadic functions
• Constant Scalar Expressions
• PHPDBG bundled by default
• Zip improved
• Importing namespaced functions

Each item on the list comes with either some sample code to show its use or a brief explanation of the features it adds or updates.