With the first stable release of PHP 5.4 not too far off, it's important to understand the new features it offers and how to use them effectively. In this new post to DZone.com Giorgio Sironi shows how to "write clean code" with these new features, including a few snippets of code to illustrate.

After seven release candidates, it's clear PHP 5.4 is coming: as always the improvements from the previous minor version are many. [...] Let's look at the new features and score them on two metrics: usefulness, and potential for abuse. I'll try to avoid discussing non-language related matters.

He starts by pointing out some of the "gotchas" that can happen with traits (like errors thrown when more than one method is named the same and that they are a separate hierarchy), the short syntax and dereferencing support for arrays, closure binding, upload progress and more. For each of them he gives two measurements - the usefulness of the feature and the potential for abuse.