PHP

Zend Technologies announced today the addition of two new PHP training courses: “Migration from PHP 4 to PHP 5” and “Zend Studio for Eclipse”. These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release.Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.9:Updated PCRE to version 7.7.Fixed overflow in memnstr().Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given.Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension.Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global. For a full list of changes in PHP 4.4.9, see the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. Windows binaries will be available starting with alpha2 (intermediate snapshots available at snaps.php.net). The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!The purpose of this alpha release is to encourage users to not only actively participate in identifying bugs, but also in ensuring that all new features or necessary backwards compatibility breaks are noted in the documentation. Please report any findings to the QA mailinglist or the bug tracker.There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes:Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)Late static binding and __callStaticLambda functions and closuresAddition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensionsOptional cyclic garbage collectionOptional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysqlWindows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore (details)New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:"Several under the hood changes also require in depth testing with existing applications to ensure that any backwards compatibility breaks are minimized. This is especially important for users that require the undocumented Zend engine multibyte support.The current release plan states that there will be alpha/beta/RC releases in 2-3 week intervals with an expected stable release of PHP 5.3 between mid September and mid October of 2008.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage for ext/reflection, ext/dom and ext/exif by about 10% each. While the organization of the TestFest was a bit adhoc, there were numerous TestFest events in local user groups. So the number of people exposed to the PHP test framework is much greater. Hopefully this will lead to more people submitting bug reports with an accompanying phpt test file!Our top submitter Felix De Vliegher has actually committed his last submissions himself since, based on the high quality of his submissions, he has been granted commit rights to the PHP repository. We have not heard back from all participants, but we encourage everybody to blog about their experience and provide us with feedback on how to improve future events.Now better late than never, here are the 10 winners of the promised elePHPant raffle sponsored by Nexen. Note that Felix asked me not to include him in the raffle, since he is already herding quite a number of elePHPants at home.Eric StewartHåvard EideMarc VeldmanMichelangelo van DamRein VeltRob YoungSami GreenburySebastian DeutschSebastian SchürmannStefan KoopmanschapWe will provide Nexen with the email addresses of the winners, so that they can arrange to get the elePHPants shipped. Also for those people wondering, you can continue to submit tests on the TestFest submission site. A bit thank you to all participants and TestFest organizers! Without the countless people that helped organize local events, implement the infrastructure and submissions reviewers, the TestFest would have obviously not worked out as well as it has. We will surely do similar events in the future based on the big success of TestFest 2008.

There is big news in the Zend Framework world this morning. Zend and Adobe are working together to put support for AMF into the framework.

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions. The most noticable changes are the function reference, predefined variables, context options and parameters and predefined exceptions manual pages, for which we would really appreciate feedback on. The upcomming PHP5.3 release introduces several major features such as namespaces, closures, late static bindings, internationalization functions, INI sections, and Phar among others. We would really appreciate any and all help we can get improving the documentation. In related news, the manual was relicensed recently and is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

Fire up the download clients, Zend Framework 1.6 RC 1 is now available. There’s nothing better than fresh code!

Every week, my good friend Nili arranges a free Webinar for anyone who wants to learn more about PHP. These webinars are always interesting and if they didn’t keep me so busy attending conferences (or planning them) I’d be at more of them. Here’s a list of the ones that are coming in the next couple of months. Since she works so hard putting these together, I know you are going to want to spare an hour every week or so and attend.

In the previous article we saw how to setup our Zend_Acl instance and how to attach it to the MVC environment (by using the Front Controller Plugin), but what about setting another action for the denied access, or how does an article be edited only by its owner?, this, and some more is what we are going to see in the following examples.

If you are in the i5 community then you know the name Erwin Earley. Recently Erwin published an article on itjungle.com on using the Zend Framework. Click on inside and let’s take a look.

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on your left, you’ll see the last five that have been published. If you’ve not had the opportunity to watch one, here is one done a while back by Bill Karwin.

Come learn about Kargo’s always-on mobile messaging architecture and mobile internet platform built using PHP 5 and the leading open-source Zend Framework.

The Zend Framework team is excited to announce a partnership between Dojo and Zend Framework. The goal is to deliver an out-of-the-box solution for building Ajax-based Web applications with Zend Framework. This is mainly targeted at users who rely on us to provide them with a best practice and an out-of-the-box experience for Ajax and don't want to have to deal with evaluating a solution (e.g. toolkits, licenses, etc.).

Below is an FAQ which sheds some more light on this announcement:

The Zend Framework team has just completed a reorganization of our subversion repository. The reorganization was necessary due to changes we are introducting both in our proposal system as well as project architecture. Specifically, we are introducing a new library, our 'Extras' library, which will contain contributions that are not officially supported by Zend but which still require successful completion of our proposal process. Additionally, we are merging our Laboratory repository.

Instructions on how to update your working checkouts or svn:externals pointers are included in this article.

Good news SourceForge junkies, the forge now supports OpenID! Better yet, they support it thanks to the Zend Framework OpenID component. Here’s the press release they published last week.

The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Ten students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer: Zend LLVM Extension by Joonas Govenius, mentored by Nuno LopesPHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick RethansPhD (PHP Docbook) Project by Rudy Nappée, mentored by Hannes MagnussonReplace auto* with CMake by Alejandro Leiva Rojas, mentored by Pierre A. Joyegsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David CoallierRewrite the run-tests.php script by Cesar Montedonico, mentored by Travis SwicegoodPHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant NarayananAlgorithm Optimizations by Michal Dziemianko, mentored by Scott MacVicarPECL, Website Improvements by Barry Carlyon, mentored by Helgi Þormar ÞorbjörnssonImplement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicarUpdate (May 11th): Unfortunately Nicholas Sloan had to drop out of the program, but he will be replaced by Rudy Nappée working on the same application.