PHP 5.3.0 finaly released.

After a very long time in development, changes and bugfixes PHP version 5.3.0 has been released as stable.
( http://news.php.net/php.internals/44538 )

The changelog is pretty big but some stuff stand out since they have been discussed extensively over the last year or so.

My favorite parts of this release (after namespaces and anonymous functions of course) seem to be the following.

  • Added “?:” operator. (Marcus)
  • Added support for __callStatic() magic method. (Sara)
  • Added __DIR__ constant. (Lars Strojny)
  • Changed __call() to be invoked on private/protected method access, similar to properties and __get(). (Andrei)
  • Added NOWDOC syntax. (Gwynne Raskind, Stas, Dmitry)
  • Added JSON_FORCE_OBJECT flag to json_encode(). (Scott, Richard Quadling)
  • Added mail logging functionality that allows logging of mail sent via mail() function. (Ilia)
  • Added gethostname() to return the current system host name. (Ilia)

Now that namespaces are a native part of PHP let’s see how will people manage to abuse them. ^_^