What is new in PHP 5.3 for PHP amateurs?

Namespaces for classes and functions

This feature will help us shorten the class names and function names. To appreciate this feature, we need to go back to the days before there was Object Oriented Programming in PHP.

MySQL Native Driver

PHP 5.3 has a native driver specific to PHP, optimised for the ZEND engine. It is an alternative to connect to MySQL server versions newer than 4.1.

phar – PHp ARchive

This is a cool new feature. Think of it like an archive, like a .zip file or a .tar file. Besides just being able to group all the files into one simple file, we will be able to deliver and run an entire PHP application from a single file!

Closures & Lambdas

This gets into the list because this is something most web developers would have been familiar with while working on Javascript. A lambda can be declared anywhere and they can be assigned to a variable. A closure on the other hand are lambda funcions but have access to the variables where they were declared.

Functors

This allows an object to be invoked as a function.

Traits

This is a new unit of reuse, traits can be incomplete, provides reusability, modularity and structure. In short it is copy-paste glorified!

Magic functions

We have a couple of new magic functions for classes (interceptors) __callstatic() and invoke()

Ternary operator

You can now display the a value that exists $value1 or $value2 using this simple statement echo $value1?:$value2;

There are many more things added like Late Static Binding, Variable Static Calls, Changes to PHP Error Levels, new PHP functions, improvements to help with OpenID, Command line and many more.