Finally, PHP community have released their new candidate PHP 5.3.0 RC1 with lots of new features which were needed by the PHP developers from long time. This can be treated as the final release of PHP 5.x series, they will continue with PHP6 soon after they release it completely.

Added Features

PHP 5.3.0 offers many new features which are as follows:

1. They Now Support Namespaces, this is one of the major functionality needed in PHP
2. Late Static Binding
3. Various Performance Improvements
4. Lambda functions and Closures
5. Syntax additions: NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut “?:” and __callStatic()
6. Garbage Collection for cyclic references (Optional)
7. mysqlnd; PHP native replacement for libmysql (Optional)
8. Improved support for windows including VC6 and VC9 binaries
9. Changes in rounding of float to be more consistent now then ever
10. Deprecation notices are now handle via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
11. New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
12. Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
13. Countless bug fixes and improvements to existing extensions in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

Removed Features

They have also dumped several several extensions and unifies usage of internal APIs. So if you are using the followings think twice before upgrading otherwise you may end up with a broken application

1. Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
2. Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
3. Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
4. Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode
5. Read the entire changes guide before upgrading (recommended)

Read the Upgrade Guide beforehand. You can download (Windows and Linux (source) ) from http://qa.php.net/

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