What exactly are late static bindings in PHP?

You definitely need to read Late Static Bindings in the PHP manual. However, I'll try to give you a quick summary.

Basically, it boils down to the fact that the self keyword does not follow the same rules of inheritance. self always resolves to the class in which it is used. This means that if you make a method in a parent class and call it from a child class, self will not reference the child as you might expect.

Late static binding introduces a new use for the static keyword, which addresses this particular shortcoming. When you use static, it represents the class where you first use it, ie. it 'binds' to the runtime class.

Those are the two basic concepts behind it. The way self, parent and static operate when static is in play can be subtle, so rather than go in to more detail, I'd strongly recommend that you study the manual page examples. Once you understand the basics of each keyword, the examples are quite necessary to see what kind of results you're going to get.

There is not very obvious behavior:

The following code produces 'alphabeta'.

class alpha {

    function classname(){
        return __CLASS__;
    }

    function selfname(){
        return self::classname();
    }

    function staticname(){
        return static::classname();
    }
}

class beta extends alpha {

    function classname(){
        return __CLASS__;
    }
}

$beta = new beta();
echo $beta->selfname(); // Output: alpha
echo $beta->staticname(); // Output: beta

However, if we remove the declaration of the classname function from the beta class, we get 'alphaalpha' as the result.

Also, watch if you update static variables in child classes. I found this (somewhat) unexpected result where child B updates child C:

class A{
    protected static $things;
}

class B extends A {
    public static function things(){
        static::$things[1] = 'Thing B';
        return static::$things; 
    }
}

class C extends A{
    public static function things(){
        static::$things[2] = 'Thing C';
        return static::$things;        
    }
}

print_r(C::things());
// Array (
//   [2] => Thing C
// )

B::things();

print_r(C::things()); 
// Array (
//    [2] => Thing C
//    [1] => Thing B
// )

You can fix it by declaring the same variable in each child class, for example:

class C extends A{
    protected static $things; // add this and B will not interfere!

    public static function things(){
        static::$things[2] = 'Thing C';
        return static::$things;        
    }
}