Removed Extensions
New Classes
Migrating from PHP 5.2.x to PHP 5.3.x
PHP Manual

## Other changes to extensions

The following extensions can no longer be disabled during build configuration:

- PCRE
- Reflection
- SPL

Changes in extension behaviour, and new features:

- Date and Time - The TZ environment variable is no longer used to guess the timezone
- cURL - cURL now supports SSH
- Network - dns_check_record() now returns an extra "entries" index, containing the TXT elements.
- Hash - The SHA-224 and salsa hash algorithms are now supported.
- mbstring - Now supports CP850 encoding.
- OCI8 - A call to oci_close() on a persistent connection, or a variable referencing a persistent connection going out of scope, will now roll back any uncommitted transaction. To avoid unexpected behavior, explicitly issue a commit or roll back as needed. The old behavior can be enabled with the INI directive oci8.old_oci_close_semantics. Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) are now supported. Oracle External Authentication is now supported (except on Windows). The oci_bind_by_name() function now supports SQLT_AFC (aka the CHAR datatype).
- OpenSSL - OpenSSL digest and cipher functions are now supported. It is also now possible to access the internal values of DSA, RSA and DH keys.
- Session - Sessions will no longer store session-files in "/tmp" when open_basedir restrictions apply, unless "/tmp" is explicitly added to the list of allowed paths.
- SOAP Now supports sending user supplied HTTP headers.
- MySQLi Now supports persistent connections, by prepending the hostname with "p:".
- Image Processing and GD The "JPG Support" index returned from gd_info() has been renamed to "JPEG Support".

Removed Extensions
New Classes
Migrating from PHP 5.2.x to PHP 5.3.x
PHP Manual