PHP 5 Moving Forward

PHP Team is moving forward by releasing PHP 5.4 Alpha 1. This release is HIGHLY unstable and SHOULD NOT be used in production environment. This release is more likely intended for developers to try and test whether their code will break on this version since it added new features and removes some legacy behaviours.

Here are some highlights from the release note:

• autoconf 2.59+ is now supported (and required)
• Removed Safe Mode, Register Globals, and several common session functions (session_is_registered, session_register, and session_unregister)
• Added: Traits language construct
• Added: Array dereferencing support
• Added: DTrace support
• Improved: Improved Zend Engine memory usage and performance
• Moved: ext/sqlite moved to pecl (sqlite3 support is still built-in)
• Many Extensions improvements
  

PHP team also released PHP 5.3.7 RC 2. This is an updated release for the upcoming PHP 5.3.7 which i predict will be released on late July or early August.