The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Release 
Candidate 1.
Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

- The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
- XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now 
focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
- A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and 
later. Additionally to a functional interface this new extension also 
includes an object-oriented interfaced and support for many of MySQL's new 
features such as prepared statements.
- SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please 
visit their website.
- A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
- A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as 
PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
- Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access 
low-level socket operations on streams.
- And lots more...

PHP 5 is now feature complete and quite stable. The purpose of the release 
candidate is to start widespread testing and use in non-mission critical 
applications.

Enjoy!