On the KingFoo blog today there's an excellent look at everything new coming up in PHP 5.4, the next version of PHP set to be released in early February.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.