TCPHP

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.

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.

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.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediateavailability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.6:Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6Update (May 6th): The Windows installers were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.Update (May 3rd): The Windows archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

Today we will talk about migrations, yaml files and CakePHP and in particular I’ll introduce you to the latest shell I’ve written for CakePHP. Migrations allow you to define changes to your database schema, making it possible to use a version control system to keep things synchronized with the actual code.

Reference counting macros; Turkish locale bugs; namespaces and autoload [continued]; constant folding optimization; zend_alter_ini_entry finally fixed

Today we are going to do something a little different. I’ve got books stacking up here that need reviewing, so I’m going to start interjecting book reviews into the podcast stream. This week’s book is “PHP In Action” by Manning Publications

Safe mode objection; namespaces and __autoload; PHP 5.3 discussions and TODO list; Windows installer extensions; magic methods and by-ref arguments; PHP 5.2.4 released

So, you want to create your own mashup? Great! Mashups—web applications that grab information from different external sources and mix it together in new and exciting ways—are fun to build and popular with users.

Multiple namespaces - and brackets; unicode.semantics (for the last time?); constants in namespaces; integrating PHP with a homegrown server; patches for LSB, setcookie2(); PHP 5.2.4 RC 3 available for testing

Today, we are going to talk to the PECL princess herself, Sara Golemon. Sara is one of the core contributors to PHP and when she’s not coding for PHP, speaking at conferences or writing books she fills her time working at Yahoo. I had the privilege of sitting down with Sara at php|works earlier this year in Atlanta GA and talk with her about her background, why she likes PHP and anything else that came to mind.

Microsoft is releasing FastCGI for IIS6, meaning the shiny little “beta” tag is finally going the way of the dodo. What is FastCGI? I could go on for pages about the technical background, and Microsoft already has some great documentation on the subject, however I’ll put it in layman’s terms for those who aren’t Computer Science majors.

The IIS Team is eager to announce the official release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 as a free download. For the first time, we are providing hosters and PHP developers full support for a stack of technology that enables reliable, scalable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

This article will introduce you to one of PEAR’s most powerful tools for generating Web forms and validating the input that arrives through them: the HTML_QuickForm package. This package provides a flexible, reusable library of methods that can literally save you hours of time when dealing with form-based user input – and best of all, it’s free and extremely easy to use.

Namespaces or packages? [continued]; reserved word alert; nowdocs revised; namespaced constants; PHP 5.2.4 RC2 available for testing

In his article, Ralph Eggert explains how one could integrate propel to his Zend application. It’s interesting to see how an _autoload php function can be used to automatically load needed classes (propel,or Zend classes) and thus avoid having to explicitly include the propel files in every controller that would need access to the model.

Today’s special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I’ve receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. Davey is a full time developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both magazine articles as well as books and regularly speaks at PHP conferences. His latest book was just released, “The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition” which he co wrote with another PHP Abstract host, Matthew Weier O’Phinney. They had a lot of help from other PHP Lumminaries including Ligaya Turmelle of phpwomen.org. A link to this brand new book can be found in the show notes.

Here’s a cool present. Recently Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare.