a week in phpworld #5

Welcome back to this weeks summary of the most interesting php-stuff happened you really should know about.

PHP's World

Ilia Alshanetsky (officially) released PHP 5.1.3 on Monday/Tuesday with a lot of improvements in common extensions like GD, SPL, cURL, Simple XML or the reflection API, security-patches, a reimplementation of the FAST-CGI Interface (leaving a lot of people happy which use FAST-CGI i.e. in combination with lighttpd) and over 120 Bugfixes. Unfortunatley some hours later it was clear that there was introduced a new critical bug with the $_POST variable and therefore we had a reason for PHP 5.1.4 ;). In the end once again the PHP-Team proved their fast reaction when such bugs appear. applause.

In addition Ilia branched PHP 5.2.0, meaning on the one hand, that we will only see security patches for the PHP 5.1.x (if necessary) from now on, and on the other hand, that we can look forward to a lot of new improvements. These will take place in extensions like DOM, PCRE, PDO, SOAP, SPL, XSL, XMLWriter and XMLReader and as well as in the Zend Engine itself. Strange to say, that there is once more a discussion about the inclusion of JSON and Input Filter into the core. Actually this was long clear and agreed, but nevertheless it seems to be an interesting topic to argue about. We will see, on what the PHP-Team will agree on: "to include or not to include ..." ;)

Another nice thing that you should know about is, that due to Jan Kneschkes work PHP finally has a "real" shell. You can find all the stuff with explanations and download at his homepage. Thanks Jan!

At chrisscott.com we find another weekly summary of what happend at PHP-GTK world. Beside some patches there is also a new PHP-GTK-Glade Tutorial available.

Zend's World

At the beginning of the week the term phpBlox made some noise in the community. phpBlox is actually a very rudimental demo of a visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) Tool, created by the guys from Zend for a keynote of Andi Gutmans at the php|tek. Jayson Minard gave an extensive explanation about all here at the devzone, so i guess most of you already know about it. If not and you are interested in visual application building based on components for php, switch over to Jaysons article and watch the screencast. It's quite interesting to see, what can be done if you have the time to do it.

Beside this the Zend Framework now got it's own Bugtracker and Source-Viewer - yes, it uses TRAC as many others do. A great tool and a wise decision of Zend to make it available. Take a look and start digging in ...

Lat but not least the people of ADOdb cloned the Zend_Db_DataObject, that bases on the active record pattern. Read it and learn :)

Conference Worlds

Shortly after the successful ending of the php|tek-conference the people from php|architect already opened the Call for Paper for the next conference: php|works / db|works. The deadline for submitting talk proposals is June 5th, 2006. So better hurry up, this probably will once again become a great conference (maybe as sold out as the php|tek).

For all of those interested in going to New York PHP Conference: the program is now complete. The conference taking place June 14-16, 2006 in Manhattan, New York will host some interesting tracks once again and you can meet famous "php-gurus" like Rasmus, Ilia, Derick and other there. So, maybe it's a good idea to think about a new plan for your holidays - june in New York may be a good resort ;)

Rest of the worlds ;)

Wez Furlong found some slides for extending PHP he actually used for a session at PHPCon West 2003. As he lost some of his example-codes, he nicely points us to Mike Wallner, who has recently built his own PECL extension for libares, which is according to Wez "much more complete (and complex)" than his examples. Derick Rethans gave a Debugging Protocol Shoot-out, after Zend had published their debugging protocol that they're going to implement for their Eclipse PHP IDE. Shoot-out you may ask? Well, its a comparison of Zend's Debugging Protocol and DBGp (used in i.e. Kommodo) with the result, that Zend's Protocol isn't that much more powerful than DBGp - so the question remains, why is it so? Maybe Zend will tell us ... Tobias Schlitt dropped a notice in his blog, that there was made a proposal the renewal of the PEAR Core-QA team. The PEAR CORE-QA-Team is dedicated to quality assurance questions in PEAR and was founded about 2 years ago. As many of the current members does not have the time to assure the quality of PEAR anymore, every PEAR-Developer is asked to propose new members for this team.

That's it for this week, catch ya next week again!