Last week saw the release of PHP 5.4. The new version has had the following improvements added:

• New language syntax including Traits, shortened array syntax and more
• Improved performance and reduced memory consumption
• Support for multibyte languages now available in all builds of PHP at the flip of a runtime switch
• Built-in webserver in CLI mode to simplify development workflows and testing
• Cleaner code base thanks to the removal of multiple deprecated language features
• Many more improvements and fixes

Also, the following compatibility changes were made:

• Register globals, magic quotes and safe mode were removed
• The break/continue $var syntax was removed
• The ini option allow_call_time_pass_reference was removed
• The PHP default_charset is now “UTF-8″ within the distributed php.ini files, but still defaults to “”

 

A full list of changes can be found in the changelog at http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.4.0