The PHP development team is proud to announce the first PHP 5.4 alpha release. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Read the NEWS file for a complete list of changes.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

This alpha release exists to encourage users to identify bugs, and to ensure that all new features and backward compatibility breaks are evaluated and documented before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Please report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

Here is an incomplete list of changes:

• Added: Traits language construct
• Added: Array dereferencing support
• Added: DTrace support
• Improved: Improved Zend Engine memory usage and performance
• Moved: ext/sqlite moved to pecl (sqlite3 support is still built-in)

Please note that some legacy behaviors were removed

• Removed: break/continue $var syntax
• Removed: register_globals, allow_call_time_pass_reference, and register_long_arrays ini options
• Removed: session_is_regisitered(), session_registered(), and session_unregister()

This is the first release that adopts the releaseprocess RFC. The next alpha will be released within four weeks. The PHP 5.4 feature set and API has not been finalized.