a week in phpworld #8

hi & welcome back to the latest wrap up of what happend the last days in the php-scene. First off lets welcome Cal Evans as a new editor of the devzone. Jayson Minard is now managing framework-stuff as well so he needed a helping hand, so thanks Jayson for the good work and "a lucky hand" to Cal!

Zends World

Zend released the new Zend Studio 5.2 - beside some minor bugfixes and the update of the php language code completion it was mainly a zend-product compatibility release. They fixed a bug regarding detection of the Zend Guard installation and integrated the installation of the zend platform. The good news for every owner of a Zend Studio Professional Licence is, that she/he now can use the Zend Platform for development-server for free. First you only get a 30-day-Evaluation key, but this one can be extended (as far as i understand it live-long). So you only have to pay for the adoption of the Zend Platform in production-environments and can test all the functionality for free first. Good deal Zend ;)

Strange enough, licence-owners of older versions (until 5.1) have to pay the full price for an update - meaning, if you bought the Studio one month ago and now want to use the Zend Platform, you need 5.2 and have to pay $240 USD (you can only get one discount, either the $240 USD valid until June 30, 2006 or the 20% off discount for "already professional user). Of course you get the Zend Platform for free without the 5.2, but if you want it integrated, see the ChangeLog, only the 5.2 version is compatible. As Christian said it, most people will probably let this version pass ...

Conferences World

A new Unconference was announced these days, the PHP Appalachia. Similar to the PHP Vikinger, this conference is just another good excuse to meet and greet with other php-nerds ;). The Unconference was announced by Elisabeth, Chris, Aaron and Ben and will be held at the Cherokee/Great Smokies KOA in Cherokee, NC on September 27-29, 2006.

For the sake of completeness, here the most current conference-outline:

• NYPHPCon, June 14-16, 2006
• FrOSCon, June 24-25, 2006
• PHP Vikinger, June 24-25, 2006
• ApacheCon Europe, June 26-30, 2006
• php|works / db|works 2006, September 13-15, 2006
• PHP Appalachia, September 27-29, 2006
• 2006 DC PHP Conference, October 18-20, 2006 --> CFP open until June 7th, 2006
• Zend/PHP Conference 2006, October 29 - November 2, 2006 --> CFP open until June 15th, 2006
• International PHP Conference, November 5-8, 2006
• Forum PHP 2006, November 9-10, 2006 --> CFP open until ... aehrm,anyone understands french?

.. so there are some conferences left with open CFP - take your chance!

Rest of the worlds

Well, what else did we get this week in phoworld? Actually there weren't any breaking news, but of course i have some tidbits for you left :)

We had some opinions about the goodness of php / the lamp stack, opened by Jason Lefkowitz telling us, that the documentation is the worst thing about php (humm, always thought, it was one of it strongest assets). Scott Johnson asked in a podcast, wether to choose PHP or Rails ... didn't listen to it myself, but that's actually a quite strange question, isn't it? I would understand "PHP vs Ruby" better, but that shows once more that Ruby is Rails is Ruby is Rails is Ruby is ... at least in the common perception. Well, Well. Then you could read, that the LAMP-Stack has fewer defects, but shortly after that Cliff Wells told us, why the light has gone out on LAMP. Guess what? Yes, someone told Cliff, that it's different.
Nexen.net published some new statistics for php (may 2006). According to them, PHP is found on 35,33% of web sites, stable from last month. PHP 5 is gaining again this month, and faster than last month, but at last takes only 8% while PHP4 takes 91% "market share". Quite interesting facts and Chris Shiflett and Denis de Bernardy commented on this.

Peter Zaitsev created a fine list of presentations about Performance with MySQL, and we could read more and more tutorials dealing with frameworks: The Symfony Challenge: Part 1 - An Outline, Easy Yahoo! Maps and GeoRSS with Symfony, ATK: Build a Complete PHP Application in 3 Clicks, An overview of the CakePHP framework, CakePHP: Web based search engine for Flickr and Zen(d) and the Art of Email. Quite interesting that people more and more seem to care about Spam Protection. People could read some tutorials about creating CAPTCHAS (How to add a custom CAPTCHA to phpBB2, Captcha - Spam preventing images, Creating a CAPTCHA with PHP) and, quite funny, the first people are already searching for methods to break the system: Decoding CAPTCHA using PHP | Hypertext Preprocessor ;)

Have a nice week and watch the worldcup!