PHP 5.3.0

Het ontwikkelteam van PHP heeft na drie alpha's, één bèta en vier release candidates uiteindelijk versie 5.3.0 uitgebracht. PHP, door zijn ontwikkelaars een 'hypertext preprocessor' genoemd, wordt voornamelijk gebruikt om dynamische content in de opmaaktaal html serverside te genereren. De software wordt veelal toegepast in combinatie met het databaseprogramma MySQL, waarmee de dynamische content van websites en fora kan worden geserveerd. De beknopte aankondiging van de nieuwe uitgave ziet er als volgt uit:

PHP 5.3.0 Release Announcement

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

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

For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.0, see the ChangeLog.