The eZ Components project has release their latest stable version - 2008.2 - for public consumption today:
The development team is happy to announce the release of the seventh
major version of eZ Components: version 2008.2. The main new development of this release is focused on the MvcTools (and
accompanying) components.
The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework, providing a dispatcher, request parsers, routing, view support and a response writer. Examples of its use can be found in the subversion repository for the project. You can see the full Changlog for the release here and you can download the latest release here.
Padraic Brady has released chapter one and chapter two of his "Surviving the Deep End" Zend Framework book:
As many of you know, the book is available online without charge. [...] Let me know your thoughts, and post any general comments or questions on the book or website here. I'll be adding a general end-of-page comment system to the mix during the next day or two so posting general comments here is a temporary stopgap.
The first chapter is just an introduction looking at what the book will cover and what the framework's all about. Chapter two gets a bit more in depth, looking at the architecture of the Zend Framework and details things like routing and how it implements MVC.
As Roy Ganornoted in a recent tweet - the long-awaitedversion 2.0 of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) extension for Eclipse has been released:
PDT 2.0 was designed based on principles different to those of Eclipse PDT 1.0. For example, different techniques were used to model workspace projects. PDT 2.0 now uses an indexing and caching mechanism for improved performance and experience with code assist and navigation. Moreover, since PHP provides enhanced Object-Oriented features like inheritance and polymorphism, PDT 2.0 provides enhanced features such as type hierarchy, override indicators and type navigation for programmers who utilize these language properties.
The extension is now lighter and faster, making better use of the Eclipse framework for caching/indexing language elements. The release also includes a method for configuring your buildpath, a "mark occurrences" feature, an icon that notes overrides, improved code assist and much more.
You can grab this latest download from a Eclipse PDT page off of the Eclipse site.
On his blog today Gopal Vijayaraghavan has posted about the release of the latest version of the APC sofware (Alternative PHP Cache) - version 3.1.2.
Finally, after nearly a year of work, it's into a release. Some new stuff has sneaked into it undocumented, that people might find interesting - apc.preload_path would be one of them. The backend memory allocation has been re-done - the api part by me and the internals by shire. There's a hell of a lot of new code in there, both rewritten and added. Tons of php4 cruft removed, php5 stuff optimized, made more stable, then less stable, made faster, then applied brakes. Made leak-proof, quake-proof and in general, idiot-proof. So, on & so forth.
To show the difference, he includes a diff of the current version against the previous - 68 files changed, 3255 insertions and 5545 deletions.
eZ Components, the enterprise-ready library of PHP components (that can be used together or separately for PHP applications has made a new release candidate available for download:
The eZ Components team just released a release candidate of the new
2008.2 release. This release candidate resolves a couple of issues that
where found during the testing and review process. The release candidate
can be installed by running the following command: pear upgrade ezc/ezcomponents
You can also download the full package from the downloads page on the eZ Components site. Check out the release announcement for more information on whats been updated.
Ian Selby has posted a look at the newly released PHP support by the Aptana software:
Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we've been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects.
He talks about new features like content assist (adding userland code to the automatic completion), completion of functions with parameters already filled in and a PHP preview server and debugger built right in. You can get more information on the Aptana website.
The PHP Group has officially released the next version in the PHP 5.2.x series (as an update to the flaw in PHP 5.2.7) - version 5.2.8:
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.8. This release addresses a regression introduced by 5.2.7 in regard to the magic_quotes functionality, that was broken by an incorrect fix to the filter extension. All users who have upgraded to 5.2.7 are encouraged to upgrade to this release, alternatively you can apply a work-around for the bug by changing "filter.default_flags=0" in php.ini.
You can download this latest release from the downloads page on the main php.net website or from your favorite local mirror.
Knut Urdalen has passed along the announcement about the 1.0 release of the Yii framework for PHP being released (by Qiang Xue).
The Yii Framework builds upon learnings and findings from over 5 years of development of PRADO. If you already know PRADO you'll get the hold of Yii quite fast. The framework is already documented quite well in The Definitive Guide to Yii (a good place to start for beginners), in addition to complete class reference and an active forum where you can meet other developers.
There is also an extension repository and a few benchmarks to help you compare it to some of the other popular frameworks out there.
Wow, after what feels like ages PHP 5.3.0alpha3 was just released. Originally we hoped to be able to release now intermediate releases every 2-3 weeks, this one took a good 2 months. Somehow this releases did its very best to stall itself. People that needed to work on things together by chance ended up being busy with other things and vacations in just the right order to make things impossible. Most of this was to be attributed to the namespace discussions, which climaxed in the backslash FUD campaign.
He notes that a stable release is probably looking good in Q1 of 2009 (with namespaces being the delaying factor). He also suggests something that could help make things a bit simpler in the future - making the internals@ mailing list read-only for anyone outside of core developers. A good bit of the confusion and bickering came from those outside the dev team and it didn't help the group come to a decision any earlier.
NOTE: This release has been recalled due to a security bug found involving magic_quotes_gpc.
The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released today - PHP 5.2.7:
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.7. 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.
These security updates include an update of the PCRE version, fixing an incorrect order with php_value, correcting a possible overflow in memnstr and more. Check out the full Changelog for more information on these updates and improvements. You can download this latest update from the PHP.net website (or your favorite mirror).
