New Features of PHP 5.3.0

PHP development team has just announced the availability of PHP version 5.3.0.
This release comes with major improvements as compared with the previous versions existing in PHP 5.x series.
PHP version 5.3.0 has many new features, as well as bug fixes (in this release over 140 bugs were repaired).
In the migration guide intended for the users of PHP 5.2.0 who want to upgrade to PHP 5.3.0,
there are explained the main differences between versions 5.2.0 and 5.3.0 of PHP.

Among the wide range of new features added in PHP 5.3.0, support for namespaces, Late Static Bindings, jump labels and native Closures (Lambda/Anonymous functions) was introduced. Two new magic methods are also supported in PHP 5.3.0: __callStatic and __invoke.

A garbage collection for cyclic references enabled by default and mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql are optional. In the same time, now you are allowed to use dynamic access to static methods.

The code execution performance is improved. On the other hand, Windows support includes VC9 and experimental X64 binaries, as well as portability features to other compatible platforms.

Other key features of PHP 5.3.0 are:

-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

The complete source code and Windows binaries of PHP 5.3.0 are available for free download,