An overview of new stuff in PHP 5.3 and some migration issues from earlier versions.

1. What's New In PHP 5.3 Chris Chubb, Code Gurus www.codegurus.com [email_address]

3. See other guides for 4.x -> 5 or 5.1 -> 5.2

4. Some of these items are things that are new to 5.2, but of interest because 5.3 has modified their implementation.

7. magic methods __get, __set, __isset, __unset, and __call must always be public and can no longer be static.

8. The __call magic method is now invoked on access to private and protected methods. (Not just public any more. Self __call)

10. 'goto' and 'namespace' are now reserved words. Do a string search in your code. More on these later

12. Date object moved into the core, and all supporting functions have also become objects. Timezone is inspected more for intervals, etc.

15. cookie functions take "httponly" so they can't be accessed by XSS attacks.

16. xmlreader now lets you set the encoding directly for reading. No more stream encoding manually.

19. Multibyte string handling functions. For you UTF-8 guys.

21. Use to encapsulate classes and variables to prevent naming collisions on large projects.

22. Namespaces are declared using the namespace keyword. A file containing a namespace must declare the namespace at the top of the file before any other code - with one exception: the declare keyword. No non-PHP code either, so don't use it with embedded PHP.

23. Sub-namespace with backslashes: namespace MyProjectubevel;

25. namespace ThisNamespace; //Continue to end of file or next namespace directive

26. or multi-line versions

27. namespace ThisNamespace { //Put your classes and variables in here }

28. Global namespace code may be put in a unnamed bracketed section.

29. namespace { //Global code }

31. 'use' will import a namespace into the current namespace and the 'as' clause can be used to alias it.

32. Note: Nested namespaces are not allowed.

33. Note: Cannot create local versions of the constants NULL, TRUE or FALSE. Do not "define(TRUE, 0);" for you jokers out there.

35. "self::" - Static references to the current class like self:: or __CLASS__ are resolved using the class in which the function belongs, as in where it was defined

36. "static::" - Replaces reference with run-time definition, so a subclass instance will use the current child class instead of the parent class.

38. Enough said.

40. Use an unnamed function as the parameter for a callback function to keep code readable and not worry about namespace collisions.

41. Can also assign an anonymous function to a variable and call like "$function($param);"

42. Anon functions may inherit certain variables from their parent "calling" stack with the "use" operator.