Question

it might be a newbie question, but does this PHP 5.4 feature

“Added class member access on instantiation (e.g. (new foo)->bar()) support.”

means that Class::factory('some_class_name') will be gone?

Answer 1

Not necessarily. A factory usually does a few things; first, it decides which kind of object to return based on some conditions, second, it generally handles dependencies too. That’s to say that if A needs B, you request A from the factory, and B will be passed along to it in creation.
You can’t do that with the (new Foo)->bar().

What’s more, is that the factory will return an object, which you can do dynamically now anyway:

$foo = new $classname;

Having a syntax like ($foo = new Foo)->bar() is helpful for the situations where you want to execute a method right after creation, or if you’re only ever executing one method on the object anyway.