Es ist soweit. php wurde soeben in Version 5.3.0 freigegeben. Mit der neuen Version wird der 5.x Version mehr Stabilität und Performance hinzugefügt und es kommen einige neue Features an Board. Die Listen über neue Features und Bugfixes sind so lang, wir möchten die hier garnicht alle im einzelnen aufführen. Ein grober Überblick:

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