The PHP development team have just announced the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

• Support for namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures
• Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut "?:" and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
• Under the hood performance improvements
• Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
• Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
• Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
• More consistent float rounding
• Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
• Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
• New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
• Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

• Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
• Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
• Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
• Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

Posted by Hatem at 1:32 PM to Announcement | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those who missed the first CodeWorks 2009 webcast, like myself, Matthew Turland posted slides and source code of his presentation titled "New SPL Features in PHP 5.3". Matthew talked about containers and how SPL can help with scalability in your application, with very interesting benchmarks comparing Arrays to SPL methods.

You can read more about SPL here and here. There are more webcasts coming this summer to celebrate the CodeWorks 09 Conference, so be sure to not miss next ones !

Posted by Hatem at 5:32 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Zend Framework team have just released 1.8.4, the fourth maintenance release in the 1.8 series with over 50 bugfixes. There is also a new page now on the website about the framework roadmap and the upcoming 1.9.0 release.

Right now, we are only detailing the upcoming 1.9.0 release, but expect to see more listings in the future. Currently we are not setting dates for the releases as this is often difficult to predict due to the fact that the releases are largely dependent on contributor schedules -- and most contributors are, in the end, volunteering their time. We are, however, targetting 1.9.0 for late July of this year.

The roadmap include actually 11 new feature, but not final, new proposals might be accepted prior to the final release. Features planned so far :

• Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Rest
• Zend_Db_Table plugin support
• Zend_Dojo: Build layer support
• Zend_Feed_Reader
• Zend_Form multipage action helper
• Zend_Ldap
• Zend_Log factory
• Zend_Log_Writer_Syslog
• Zend_Queue
• Zend_Test_PHPUnit database support
• Zend_View_Helper_BaseUrl

Download latest version from Zend Framework website. Released under New BSD License.

Posted by Hatem at 8:51 AM to PHP5 Frameworks | Permalink | Comments (0)

The PHP development team have just announced the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.10. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, one of which is security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.10:

* Fixed bug #48378 (exif_read_data() segfaults on certain corrupted .jpeg files). (Pierre)

Further details about the PHP 5.2.10 release can be found in the release announcement, and the full list of changes are available in the ChangeLog.

Posted by Hatem at 11:27 AM to Announcement | Permalink | Comments (0)

The PHP Team have just announced the availability of two releases candidate PHP 5.2.10RC2 and PHP 5.3.0RC3.

These RCs focuses on bug fixes and stability improvements, and we hope only minimal changes are required for the next candidate or final stable releases.

PHP 5.2.10 is a pure maintenance release for providing bugfixes and stability updates. PHP 5.3.0 is a newly developed version of PHP featuring long-awaited features like namespaces, late static binding, closures, the famous GOTO and much more.

Please download and test these release candidates, and report any issues found. Downloads and further information is available at qa.php.net. See also the work in progress 5.3 upgrade guide.

Posted by Hatem at 12:30 PM to Announcement | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flourish is an object-oriented PHP 5 library designed to reduce code and improve security. It’s not an MVC framework and it doesn’t try to solve every problem. Instead, it focuses on being small, portable, well documented and easy to use.

Flourish provides classes to simplify many common and repetitive tasks in PHP with class APIs that are simple and intuitive. It helps produce code that is easy to write, and more importantly, easy to read and maintain.

The project is very well documented, and to get started you need PHP 5.1+, it include an ORM for supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server, in addition for being built with internationalization and localization in mind. Flourish is available under the MIT license.

Posted by Hatem at 6:51 AM to PHP5 Frameworks | Permalink | Comments (0)