a week in phpworld #7
Hi and welcome back to my current look back to what happened in phpworld last week. The week before you might have noticed there was no look back due to some circumstances beyond my control, but I will wrap up those things in this weeks summary, too.
PHP’s World
Derick Rethans released a first Release Candidate of PHP 4.4.3, which you can find here:
http://downloads.php.net/derick/. Derick asks you all to “test it carefully, and report any bugs in the bug system, but only if you have a short reproducible test case“. If all goes well, he will release the final Version at end of month.
Marcus Boerger welcomes seven students to Google’s summer of code – “protected” by the PHP-Team. Here are the lucky ones with their mentors:
- PDF PECL extension (Lauris Bukais-Haberkorns, mentored by Michael Wallner)
- phpAspect (Candillon William, mentored by Sebastian Bergman)
- PHP Macro Preprocessor (Pavlo Shelyazhenko, mentored by Marcus Boerger)
- Quality Assurance GCOV website (Daniel Pronych, mentored by Nuno Lopes)
- Livedocs – making DocBook less painful, and manuals more useful (Philip Olson, mentored by Ilia Alshanetsky)
- New package to read, create or modify OpenDocument files (Alexander Pak, mentored by Lukas Smith)
- DML support: an improvement to PEAR::MDB2_Schema (Igor Feghali, mentored by Lukas Smith)
Of course everybody is asked to help those seven students, to win that battle 
Shopping worlds
One news from the week before was that OmniTI aquired Brain Bulp, the consulting company of Chris Shiflett. With the acquisition of Brain Bulp, OmniTI adds expertise in the area of web application security to their PHP-based service portfolio or, to say it with Chris’ own words it basically means, that he ist now “a principal of OmniTI and get to work with some of the smartest and friendliest people around, such as George, Theo, Wez, Laura, and Amy.” Congrats to both parties, i am curious to see what we have to expect in the near future from the new OmniIT.
Conference Worlds
We have some interesting conferences at the horizon: ApacheCon Europe, FrOSCon, NYPHPCon, Forum PHP 2006, php|works / db|works 2006, Zend/PHP Conference 2006, International PHP Conference, the 2006 DC PHP Conference and ofcourse PHP Viking – and for some of these upcoming events we’ve got news: Let me remind you, that the CfP for FrOSCon ends this week (propose a talk), the CfP for the php|works / db|works 2006 ends on June 5, 2006, the CfP for the Zend/PHP Conference 2006 ends in end of june and the CfP for the 2006 DC PHP Conference ends at July 7, 2006. Just in case you never heard of the last one, here some cite from their website: “The 2006 conference features presentations, workshops, and discussions on the advantages of PHP, as well as case studies of proven PHP applications that are used within and in support of government systems.” So better tidy up your mind now and propose your interesting talks! Ah, did i mention that the official program of the NYPHPCon is already announced? Have a look at it, its very promising … When i have a look at all those conferences, the last days of October / first November-days seem to become very exiting Maybe we should start a competition, who will be at the most conferences at the shortest time – eXtreme Conference Hopping
Magazines World
Our friends from php|architect have announced their current issue of their magazine. This month XML guru Rob Richards talks about the XMLWriter-Extension, PHP gets clustered on Linux, Tobias Schlitt demonstrates the PEAR Installer and Ilia Alshanetsky steals your sessions in his security column. If you can’t get enough of all those articles, php|architect set up a new subsite called ART, “a new, freely available article repository will be launched that aims to provide useful, unique and palatable information on PHP as well as related technologies such as databases, javascript, xml, daemons, internals, scaling and interoperability“.
Rest of the worlds
Well, whatelse is worth to mention? My good friend Paul M. Jones released a new version of its Solar-Framework 
. Beside its number 0.19.0 now, he has changed the licence from LGPL to New BSD. Of course there are other things, too – so check them out.
Tobias Schlitt gave his first interview and gave an excellent online talk about eZ components at dynamic web pages. The talk was for free and in german – and the good news is, we’ve got a record, so if you are interested in it, simply register at dynamic web pages training camp and mail the organizer your accountname in order to get access. As you can read in Tobias’ Blogentry, there is planned a second part of it, so stay tuned!
Harry Fuecks gives us another reason why we all should/could love php – it’s all about file_put_contents(). On the other hand we have an update of Edwin Martin’s “What I don’t like about PHP”
Ben Ramsey showed us how to create an image from XML Data, Davey Shafik set up a Filtering & Escaping Cheat Sheet, Marco Tabini wrote about JSON and PHP (More Than Web Services) and on IBM Developerworks you could find out how to actually build a Web service with PHP. Devshed served the community once again with a lot of PHP-Tutorials, this week with stuff about sockets and networking. Build a Query Processor Class for Networking in PHP 5 and Adding Methods to the Query Processor in PHP as like as an Introduction to Sockets in PHP. If you are curious about Flex, you can find out how to build Rich Internet Applications With PHP and Flex (Part 1) at php|architects ART.
Okay, thats it mainly for the last week – ’till next time!
One comment to “a week in phpworld #7”
May 30th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Typo: Chris Shiflett’s company name is Brain Bulb.