So, this app I hadn't been looking at in a few months did not work at all. I traced the bug down to a method that itself called a parent method. The parent only contains __call and __callStatic methods, and for some reason __callStatic was called, although the class it was called from was an object instance.

After using some sample code from the PHP manual, they spotted how things truly worked - the call is always sent to __callStatic when called from the extending class but not when called directly. Apparently they aren't the only ones that noticed the bug but noted that it was removed in PHP 5.3.4 to fix the issue.

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

In my previous post I mentioned that PHP 5.3 will be released in early 2008 so I think it's just in time to talk about the features of this version. [...] The big gun features are namespaces, late static binding and mysqlnd, but there are other interesting improvements, for example __callStatic, dynamic static calls. In this part of this series we are going to analyze namespaces in detail.

Included in the post are a "before" and "after" example of namspacing in a PHP application, code examples of namespaces in action, simple porting of current PHP 5.2 applications up to 5.3 and working with __autoload and Reflection.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

Included in his list of updates are things like: namespaces, late static binding, the __callStatic magic method and the mysql native driver (mysqlnd). He also recommends that, if you're currently running something in the PHP 5.2.x series, you update to the latest on that before making the jump to PHP 5.3 when it comes out.