Brandon Savage has a new post to his site today showing you how to compile and install PHP 5.5, the next major upcoming release for the language (in RC status as of the time of this post though).

There's always a lag behind new releases of PHP and releases of packages for operating systems such as Ubuntu. This lag time means that you could be kept from upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP for a year or more, unless you use an outside repository like Dotdeb. [...] Instead, I roll my own version of PHP. It's simple and easy to do, and something that any developer can do. Here's my instructions for doing so on a fresh Ubuntu installation.

He gives a reason or two why you might want to "roll your own" installation and helps you get the environment prepared via some "aptitude" install commands for supporting software. Commands are included for installing needed dependencies, configuring/building PHP and updating Apache to use this new install. He finishes it up with a few smaller things to do like making the php.ini and enabling the Zend opcode caching extension.

As developers, one of the best things you can do for a project is to use version control (or "source control") for your code. Lorna Mitchell suggest using it on a wider scale, though. She sees it as a great place for all sorts of other things around a project too.

Short answer: everything! However we need some good directory structures and source control configuration to make that a really practical answer, so this article is a quick outline of my usual advice for a good source control structure for a standard web project. The examples are for a PHP project but I'm sure you could apply this to your own language of choice, also.

These "other things" she suggests that should end up in source control including things like:

• The actual "web root" of your application
• Library code
• Build scripts
• Configuration files
• Database patches
• Tests (unit, functional, integration, etc)

In this recent post to his site Phil Sturgeon has a reminder that you should select the dependencies for your packages wisely, and not just because they're "cool."

When I say "make sure it is worth it" I mean, don't just switch your arrays from array() to [] just because it looks cool. That was the extent of my original tweet, because I've seen a few packages doing that and it annoyed me immensely. [...] Suffice it to say, if you require a user to upgrade their version of PHP simply so you can use some syntactical sugar inside a package that nobody else is even going to be looking at, then you're an idiot. Beyond that, you're actually hurting the community.

He notes that, by requiring users that are currently only at 3.1% of PHP installs to upgrade to 5.4 just to use your library is a quick way to not have your library used. He points out that PHP 5.4 is "more than just []" for arrays and includes a reminder that several projects are still in PHP 5.3-compatibility mode just because that's the widest audience. He also briefly touches on the "push it forward" comments that people have used to justify 5.4-only packages, but notes that it's still not as much up to the developer as it is the web host.

According to this new report on the W3 Techs site, the usage of PHP 5.2 has been passed up by the numbers for the usage of PHP 5.3 (finally).

PHP 5.3 has been released in June 2009, so it took a while to gain that level of popularity. End of support for PHP 5.2 has been declared in December 2010, but is was still the most popular version until now. Version 5.3 will enter the end-of-life cycle in March 2013. Version 5.4, used by only 3.0%, is now considered state-of-the-art.

The numbers have been consistently trending towards intersection with the usage of PHP 5.4 picking up, but no where near the 5.3 and 5.2 numbers. They also point out that PHP version adoption has a history of being slow. Contributing factors to this could be the overall impression of the language and how much "room for improvement" it seems to have.

It's not difficult to predict that PHP as a language will continue to dominate web development in the near future. What will be more exciting is to watch what new versions of PHP will look like.

In this new post to his site Aaron McGowan talks about new features of the upcoming PHP 5.5 release - the "finally" keyword and generators.

PHP 5.5 has recently been released as an ALPHA release, meaning there are still bugs, code is being tested and features being added. With the 5.5 release, many of us PHP developers have a few wonderful new features that we should be taking advantage of almost immediately.

He gives brief introductions to these two new features, including some code examples (but getting a bit more into the generators side of things). You can find out more about these two features and how to implement them when PHP 5.5 comes around from the PHP sitel: generators and finally (actually from the PHP wiki).

PHPClasses.org has released their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series. This episode (#31) talks some about some of the changes happening in versions in PHP in the upcoming months.

As PHP 5.5 is getting ready to be released in the next months, the end of line for PHP 5.3 is being planned, while the original MySQL extension is being deprecated in PHP 5.5 to be killed in a later version.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recorded Google Hangout of the taping.

The latest episode of the PHP Town Hall podcast has been release - Episode #2, "a Node Hipster, Beardy Python Fan, PHP Contributor and a Bristolian Talk About PHP 5.5"

We're back for an "IRL" episode, with Zack Kitzmiller, John Crepezzi and Anthony Ferrera, discussing PHP 5.5 and the new features it will bring.

You can listen to this latest episode through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get the latest as they're released.

Continuing on with his look at the newly released version of the MongoDB driver for PHP Derick Rethans has posted more detail about the advanced connection handling options this new driver version provides.

The 1.3 release series of the PHP MongoDB driver features a rewritten connection handling library. This is quite a large change and changes how the PHP driver deals with persistent connections and connection pooling.

He starts with an example of a v1.2 driver connection, how the connection is requested from a pool and how, based on the integration of a worker into the connection process, v1.3 handles the connection requests. He includes a bit about replica set connections and authentication connections, complete with PHP code examples showing them in practice.

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

Sherif Ramadan has a new post that gets into some good detail about what you can expect in the upcoming PHP 5.5 release with loads of new features.

There's been some talk about PHP 5.5.0 over the past couple of months even though it is barely on the horizon. The reason for this is that the PHP project has seen some increased levels of activity over the last two years since the dawn of PHP 5.4 and now in to the early twilight phase of PHP 5.5.0-dev. For those of you that haven't been following the internals mailing list I'm about to give you a quick test-drive and sneak-peak at PHP 5.5 using the latest 5.5.0-dev branch (which is still TBD).

Obviously, since the actual release of this version has yet to be determined, some of this may change over time. He gets into some of the major advancements and features that will be included like:

• the "finally" keyword
• list() support in foreach()
• the Password Hashing API
• generators
• a new property accessor syntax
• scalar type hints

Code samples are provided in some places to help make a bit more sense out of the example.