Daniel Cousineau has posted briefly about a relatively new addition to the feature set of the upcoming PHP 5.3 release - closures.

I'm fairly excited because as of only a week or so ago I found the closures rfc, and not only did I find that the rfc has a working patch, apparently it's already in PHP 5.3. You see, apparently it's not good enough that we get name spaces and late static binding, oh no, we get closures too!

He downloaded a snapshot and gave it a try - code examples are included with his post.

Today on the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen reminds the community about a "one-stop resource" that they can use to keep up to date on some of the latest happenings with the PHP language, the PHP.net wiki.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

Chris Hartjes has made made a few comments on his blog about things going on in the online world - two of which pertain to PHP:

• Closures and lambdas coming to PHP - he mentions the addition of lambdas and closures into the next major version of PHP (5.3) and his thoughts on how they've been abused in the past.
• The Framework Jihad:

  If you substitute "modularized code with standardized API" for "framework", would that make people feel better? I use frameworks because so much of the infrastructure code is stuff I DO NOT WANT TO WRITE ANY MORE. After 10 years of doing this, it's time I stopped reinventing things. My old motto of "just build it, damnit!"

Check out his post for a bit more complete versions of these thoughts.