PHP 5.3.0 RC 1

PHP team has just released their first release candidate which will eventually became PHP 5.3.0. This version will soon obsolete 5.2 series which has been used for years and it's proven to be stable.

What's new in PHP 5.3.0 ? A LOT
If you look at this NEWS, you will see lots of changes included in this release (roughly 3796 lines).

Here are some of the highlights taken from PHP's website:

• Support for namespaces
• Under the hood performance improvements
• Late static binding
• Lambda functions and closures
• Syntax additions: NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:" and __callStatic()
• Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
• Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
• Improved windows support including VC6 and VC9 binaries
• More consistent float rounding
• Deprecation notices are now handle 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
• Countless bug fixes and improvements to existing extensions in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies 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
• See the upgrading guide for other minor changes