The PHP development team announces the release of the 3rd beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs against beta 2. This is a development preview - do not use it in production. PHP 5.5.0beta3 is shipped with some bug fixes and improvements.

Updates include the dropping of bison <2.4 support, a fix for the DateTime serialize/unserialize and an update to the key handling in foreaches. You can see information on these changes and many more in the NEWS file and can download the beta release from the usual sources: source, Windows binaries.

Late last week, the Zend Framework community 2.0.0beta3, the latest iteration of the v2 framework. What have we been busy doing the last couple months? In a nutshell, getting dirty with view layers, database abstraction, and configuration.

He covers each topic well, providing code examples for all three - a simple view layer (more here), database abstraction functionality (inserting, selecting and TableGateway) and the configuration changes that allow for things like key translation, section inheritance and constant substitution.

This new revision of the framework is geared towards greater developer productivity and application performance, providing rich support for the leading cloud services and providers, and a streamlined and simple workflow for developing next-generation mobile applications and APIs.

[...] Zend Framework 2 highlights [include]: Simpler and easier to use components, better modularity and code reuse, significantly improved performance, an entirely new Cloud Infrastructure component and full PHP 5.3 support right now.

The project roadmap has the Beta 4 release happening in the second quarter of 2012 with a general availability release happening the following quarter (Q3). Guides are in the works to help ease the transition from the 1.x releases of Zend Framework up to 2.x.