What's new in PHP 5.3 ?

PHP 6 is just around the corner, but for developers who just can't wait, there's good news -- many of the features originally planned for PHP 6 have been back-ported to PHP 5.3, a final stable release of which is due in the first half of this year.

This news might also be welcomed by those that wish to use some of the new features, but whose hosting providers will not be upgrading to version 6 for some time -- hosting providers have traditionally delayed major version updates while acceptance testing is performed (read: the stability has been proven elsewhere first). Many hosting companies will probably delay upgrading their service offerings until version 6.1 to be released. A minor upgrade from 5.2.x to 5.3, however, will be less of a hurdle for most hosting companies.

This article introduces the new features, gives examples of where they might be useful, and provides demo code to get you up and running with the minimum of fuss. It doesn't cover topics such as installing PHP 5.3 -- the latest development release of which is currently available. If you'd like to play along with the code in this article, you should install PHP 5.3, then download the code archive. An article on installing PHP 5.3 can be
found on the Melbourne PHP Users Group web site.
Namespaces

Before the days of object oriented PHP, many application developers made use of verbose function names in order to avoid namespace clashes. Wordpress, for example, implements functions such as wp_update_post and wp_create_user. The wp_ prefix denotes that the function pertains to the Wordpress application, and reduces the chance of it clashing with any existing functions.

In an object oriented world, namespace clashes are less likely. Consider the following example code snippet, which is based on a fictional blogging application:

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