Nate Abele just announced Lithium 0.9 on the rad-dev blog.  I think Lithium is a great looking framework and can't wait for it to get a 1.0 release and really start to take off.  However, looking through the examples I started to notice that the use of the "use" namespace keyword was an often used convention.  It reminded me of the require/require_once creep of the days of old.  I was discussing it with Nate via Twitter, but I couldn't seem to get my point across.  Maybe I will have better luck here...

The namespace operator in PHP 5.3 is a backslash (). One of the criticisms of this operator is that the code starts to look like directory paths on Windows. The added side benefit of this is that spl_autoload() knows how to autoload classes that use a namespace style that matches the directory layout.