In my previous post I mentioned that PHP 5.3 will be released in early 2008 so I think it’s just in time to talk about the features of this version. It is started by this polling (in detail, in an ordered version) on the internal list. The big gun features are namespaces, late static binding and mysqlnd, but there are other interesting improvements, for example __callStatic, dynamic static calls. In this part of this series we are going to analyze namespaces in detail.

NAMESPACES BASIC

Namespace support in PHP was a long-felt want feature. In PHP the main motivation behind adding namespace support to the language was to solve the problem of long class names. If you develop a bigger library, you have to use long class names to avoid naming conflicts, for example look at this monster: Zend_Search_Lucene_Analysis_Analyzer_Common_Text_CaseInsensitive.

From the version 5.3 you can group your code into namespaces. Different namespaces can contains classes, functions, constants with the same name. Defining a namespace is very straightforward, you should use the namespace statement in the very beginning of the file, for example:

part 1: namespaces

part 2: late static binding

part 3: mysqlnd

part 4: __callStatic, OpenID support, user.ini, XSLT profiling and more