PHP 5.3 at phpNW08

In php 5.3 we'll see PHAR php archives, like Java's JAR for distributing an app as a single file.

From the command line, phar.phar is used to build php archives. Once Apache/Lighty knows that php is used to handle phar files, webPhar is used to obtain a 1:1 mapping of URLs to the files in the php archive.

In addition, garbage collection has improved, speeds are faster (down to 20% of php4 runtimes) and the standard PHP library has been extended beyond iterators

Upgrade documentation is growing on the php wiki scratchpad.