he PHP Programming Innovation Award Winner of 2012 was announced. An interview with the winner, Karl Holz from Canada, was one of the main topics of the episode 33 of the Lately in PHP podcast conducted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert. They also discussed the usual batch of PHP topics of interest like Zend Optimizer+ source code that was released, the PHP 5.5 feature freeze and roadmap, as well an article that compares PHP to an Hobbit, as well other languages to Lord Of The Rings story characters.

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 recording. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.5 and 5.2.17. This release resolves a critical issue, reported as PHP bug #53632 and CVE-2010-4645, where conversions from string to double might cause the PHP interpreter to hang on systems using x87 FPU registers. The problem is known to only affect x86 32-bit PHP processes, regardless of whether the system hosting PHP is 32-bit or 64-bit. You can test whether your system is affected by running this script from the command line.

All users are strongly encouraged to update their releases. While the problem only happens in certain circumstances, it can still be a huge problem since the data comes directly from the user. For more information about the issue see this post.

PHP has different in-core callbacks able to help us with daily deployment, debug, improvements. At the same time, PHP is loads of intrinsic "gotcha", too often hard to understand, hard to explain, or simply hard to manage. One common problem is about debug, caching, or freezing, and the way we would like to debug, cache, or freeze, variables.

He presents the problem - serializing variable information to "freeze" it and how recursion can cause problems down the line. He looks at the two different kinds of recursion (recursion and recursion by reference) and, after looking at a few possible solutions to fix things, eventually comes down to a way to remove the recursion "without losing it".

The biggest change is dropping of OO functionality in closures as full OO support for closures is planed for a later release than PHP 5.3.0. See http://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures/removal-of-this. This release marks the begin of a feature freeze and bug fix only phase. If in doubt whether your change is a bugfix please run it by Lukas and me.

You can download the packages here:

• tar.bz archive
• tar.gz archive
• Winodws builds

The Object_Freezer library for PHP provides the low-level functionality to store ("freeze") and fetch ("thaw") any PHP userland object to and from arbitrary object stores. Today I added an object storage implementation that uses Apache CouchDB as its backend.

His example creates an instance of a Foo class, passes it into the "freezer" object which, thanks to his new additions, automatically drops it into a Couch DB database for holding. The same is done for the "thaw" process - a call to fetch() and the object is returned as good as new.

One of the many new features that have been added for PHP 5.3 is the setAccessible() method of the ReflectionProperty class that is part of PHP's Reflection API. This method makes protected and private attributes (unfortunately, the class is called ReflectionProperty instead of ReflectionAttribute) of a class or object accessible for the ReflectionProperty::getValue() and ReflectionProperty::setValue() methods, thus making protected and private attributes "open" for full read and write access from the outside.

A bit of code shows how to "freeze" and "thaw" the objects out - creating an object, calling the freeze() method on it to protect it from use, then the thaw() method to bring it back out where it can be accessed. Stefan Priebsch helped to create this class and the patch.

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less.

New features will have to go through either him or Johannes to be included and they are doing their best to get the alpha 1 release of this new version out by July 31st.

Lukas is also trying a more unconventional approach to bug fixes to try to get the major ones knocked out first - posting them as a comment to this blog post. So far, no comments on bugs have been added, but there are a good number to get through. To help narrow it down he's also put out a plea to developers out there to help validate current bugs to potentially knock off a few of the ones that can be marked bogus.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

In a couple of days, the Zend Framework project reaches the most important milestone in its development. On Thursday March 15, 9:00pm PDT, we will declare a code-freeze for the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. After a day or so of integration testing, we will release Zend Framework 0.9.0 Beta.

The main difference between this release and some of the previous is that, with the release of this new beta version, the Zend Framework is (functionally) ready to be declared a stable 1.0 status. The stable release is currently scheduled to be released at the end of March 2007.

We are in the final week of development for Zend Framework Preview Release 0.6.0! We are on schedule to call a code-freeze on Friday December 15. [...] The code-freeze for 0.6.0 should be lifted by Monday December 18.

Some of the improvements in the upcoming version include a more mature MVC environment, architecture changes to several modules, new components, and much more. Be sure to keep an eye on the Framework's website and here for an update when the new Preview Release has been posted.