An alpha (early test) version of PHP 5.3 has been released:

PHP 5.3 alpha1 released!

What interests me the most about this release is that it contains a number of features that were originally planned for PHP 6.x, such as namespaces, but are now being back-ported to PHP 5.3.x which is really nice:

Namespaces

The Phar extension also looks really interesting to me, which appears to be a very similar concept to the .war files I build every day during my Java-based day job:

Phar

Some excellent features coming our way with PHP 6.x!

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Updated 2021 : note this post is from 2008 and is left here for archival purposes. In the end we never got PHP 6, but we did get 7 and now 8 :-)