Introduction to PHP5

PHP5 is not yet official but the development versions are already usable (and unstable!) so we can
start to learn and practice the new features of the upcoming version of PHP. In this article I will
focus in three major new features of PHP5:.

• The new object model
• Exceptions
• Namespaces

First of all a couple of disclaimers:

• Some of the techniques described in this article can be done with PHP4, but are
  presented anyway to make the whole article more readable.
• Some of the features described in this article may change in the final
  release of PHP5.

PHP5 has not been released yet and I don’t know when that will be but you can
already try and investigate the new features of the language by downloading and
installing a PHP5 development version from http://snaps.php.net. There you will find
Linux and Windows versions of PHP5 ready to be used. Installation proceeds as in any
normal PHP distribution so go there and grab a brand new toy.