with late static bindings, hopefully the php-activerecord project will get more attention and users since 5.3 is out of release candidates.

http://github.com/kla/php-activerecord/tree/master

I agree that this release provides some much-needed missing features, but I fear that the culture of php, when presented with these new features, will use them to build even more crufty, difficult-to-read code. As a coder and debugger of much php code, I hope I'm wrong about that.

Oh thank you! Lambda functions! I'm so sick of working with php's silly create_function hack for lambda functions.

This will make working in php so much more convenient!

I'm also glad to see the ternary shortcut (?:) added.

Huge forward step while you are still far far behind = still far behind.