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Pádraic Brady is in the midst of creating a book about the Zend framework. On its own, not huge news, but the way its being done is most interesting. It will be free to read, and new chapters will be added as they are written. Also each paragraph can be commented on. So think something is not clear or not correct, tell the author right there. Bruce Eckel has in the past done similar things with his ‘Thinking in …’ books, and he believes it makes for a better book.

The new zend framework book is called Surviving The Deep End, and can be found on its own site. 2 chapters are currently available

The Eclipse plugin - PHP Development Tools (PDT) has released version 2.0 for download.

This new version uses the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit and with reduced dependencies is claimed to be lighter and faster. There are numerous enhancements, with the best improvements around support for object oriented programming, code highlighting and builds.

PHP advent is on again this year. Different people from around the diverse PHP community write an article on a topic of their choice. Submissions so far run from code to structure to changing jobs. Read through in a quiet time.

It has been announced that Qcodo PHP framework has been forked into QCubed. The stated reason is

[t]he inactivity of the Qcodo project has proved frustrating to many. I’m happy to announce that Open Source has triumphed, and several community members have banded together to fork Qcodo.

This is the second time a fork of Qcodo has been made. Earlier in the year Qcodo was forked to Zcodo but attempts had been publicly announced to merge the project back together. It seems this has been a failure, and QCubed has been created based on Qcodo 0.3.43. A 1.0 RC has been made available and work has begun in areas like documentation which had fallen well behind in Qcodo.

PHP version 5.27 was officially released and quickly replaced with 5.28. The regression errors introduced in 5.27 affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled. So skip 5.27 and go straight to 5.28.

PHP 5.3 is getting closer. The third alpha release is now public. The current plan is for betas and release candidates every 3-4 weeks and a full release by the end of March 2009.

The most high profile new feature is namespaces. This has been a while coming and not without complaint, especially regards to the seperator chosen - \. Many other languages and a number of developers wanted :: , and for a while this was going to be the choice. A number of possibilities did get a look in.

PHP 4.4.9 has been released. This is to be the last release on the 4.4 line. This release is a combination of security enhancements and fixes. And all just before 8/8/08.

PHP6 is still on the horizon, as is 5.3 which had a first alpha released a few days ago.

It has been announced that PHP4 support is to cease with only critical support fixes to be made. The details are that new releases on the PHP 4 line will cease at the end of 2007, and security fixes may be made available until August 8, 2008. They encourage all users to upgrade to PHP5.
PHP6 is on the horizon but no definite timeframe is given.

From XSS News comes a link to an application called Pixy. It is a java app that takes PHP code and warns of potential cross site scripting and/or SQL injection vulnerabilities.

There is plenty of documentation, with good explanations of what Pixy can and cannot achieve. For example you cannoy throw it a directory of code, and have it find problems. If your PHP code has multiple entry points, then it needs to be run once for each of these.

A web version is available to do XSS test on single pieces of PHP code. There is a requirement to have Perl installed on your system for the download version.

A new PHP framework is on the scene: Kohana. Kohana is a fork of the CodeIgniter framework. Originally the chosen name was BlueFlame but this had trademark issues. The given reason for the fork is about who controlled where CodeIgniter was heading, and was responsible for new releases. Though CodeIgniter is released under an open source license (which meant the fork could happen), it is controlled by EllisLab, not the user community as wished by the starters of Kohana. EllisLab has ExpressionEngine (a content management system) as a commercial product, and some say this as slowing down new releases of CodeIgniter.
Read all Kohana fork from CodeIgniter