There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc. It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself (the generated Ubuntu packages), you can get more information over on the Launchpad page for the project. As always, feedback is welcome on the PHP internals list about your experiences.

For 5.2.15:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.15. This release marks the end of support for PHP 5.2. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3. This release focuses on improving the security and stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with a small number, of predominately security fixes.

For 5.3.4:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.4. This is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes.

For full details you can the the Changelogs for each release - 5.3.4 and 5.2.15. As always, you can download these latest versions from the main PHP site or your favorite local mirror.

A meeting of the development team on July 30th nixed the inclusion of PHP 5.3 from inclusion in Karmic, the next iteration of Ubuntu for the desktop and the server. According to meeting minutes, there is concern amongst the Ubuntu security team that failure to include the suhosin patch in the PHP release would be a feature regression. Instead, the release will be referred to PPA until more testing can be completed.

Until the package is officially accepted and where users can update it as usual, you can still try your hand at compiling it manually and getting your Apache server up and running quickly.

The good news is that if you've been keeping your applications current with the language and best practices, there are very few things that could affect you. The bad news is that the farther away from the current version of the language you get, the harder it is going to be to port your code. For developers coding against the 5.2 branch, there are a few edge case situations of which, you need to be aware.

The post includes a list of the major updates to the functionality of PHP 5.3 including changes to some of the array functions, deprecated functionality and the addition of two new reserved words - GOTO and NAMESPACE.

A question that seems to be popping up more and more these days is, "When will PHP 6 be released?" It's especially annoying because the people that enjoy an exercise in futility ask this question are the same people that simply refuse to take WIR [When it's ready] for an answer. Or maybe they just read into the hype generated by trigger-happy publishers who want to preempt a stable release, I don't really know.

He points out some of the current stats - PHP 5.3's beta release date as coming to the original date, that PHP 6 code hasn't even been moved outside of CVS and the amount of work left to be done on it before its even close to being ready. This is where you come in - the internals folks contribute their time (off-hours usually) to developing the language and can only do so much:

So respect them and their time and stop asking when it's going to be ready, because they don't really know much better [about PHP6] than you do.

He also suggests two other things that you can do to keep up with the current state of development - keep your version updated and track the RFCs to see what features are being added and any bugs that might still be open for pre-release. You have to be proactive about keeping up with the current status - otherwise, you have no room to ask, over and over, "when will it be done?"

The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce a major upgrade to the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project. PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications. The focus of the PDT 2.0 release is to add support for the object-oriented programming features of PHP and to improve the overall user experience of the PDT environment.

Improvements in the latest release include a type hierarchy view, override indicators, a new indexing and searching engine, a more sophisticated Code Assist feature and much more.

I am probably not the first to notice that, but thought it would be worth mentioning anyway. Zend have released version 6.0 of Zend Studio for Eclipse. Actually, this version 6.0 is the first final version of the Eclipse edition of Zend Studio.

He walks through this new version, commenting on everything from the interface to the version of PHP it cmes with out to an issue he had with updating (and how it was corrected).

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow phpdeveloper to get the latest updates. It uses the Twitter Feed website to pull our feed in and push it out, so you'll get the latest updates as they come out.

While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.

TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.

I have compiled 5.0.36 libs mysqlf since that release didn't include pre-built windows binaries. I thought it would be the best if we bundled "original" MySQL DLLs so here is the PHP 4.4.6 binary compiled against 5.0.37 MySQL libraries. Upcoming versions of PHP5 are going to include this version of MySQL client library as well.

Click here to download this latest version (two files, both to be dropped into your existing install directory.