The PHP development team has announced the first alpha release of PHP 5.3. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Few additions and improvements in this version are as following:

· Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)
· Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions
· Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql

The PHP development team suggests that there will be alpha/beta/RC releases in 2-3 week intervals and a stable release of PHP 5.3 can be expected between mid September and mid October of 2008. They also strictly suggest that this is a development preview and should not be used in production.