Among the group, Paul Jones has been writing serveral proposals under the PSR-1 standard banner that include:

• The basic draft of the standard
• An extended draft of the same
• A more advanced version, PSR-2 that also includes some survey results on various syntax elements.

If you want to know more about the PHP-FIG group, you should listen to this excellent panel interview of the group from the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast. Paul and others get into the point of the group and how the standards are progressing.

Cal and Paul talk about the Aura project, a PHP 5.3 framework and how it relates to some of the base work that the Solar framework provided for it. He mentions the work being done on the database components to work with SQL Server and how some of the coming SQL Server features will be implemented.

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Things they talk about include Paul's involvement with the Solar framework project and Cal asks him his "three questions":

• What do you look for in a potential employer?
• Why did you write Solar?
• What advice do you have to Open Source projects to help foster community?

You can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

In this episode, I'm going to give a brief overview of Solar project and how it helps with the mundane aspects of building applications. Solar is an open-source library and framework for PHP 5; you can read more about it at solarphp.com...

The rest of the show notes includes links to things like Yawp, Solar's built-in localization and it's exception handling code.

Check out more about Solar at Solarphp.com and check out the PHP Abstract podcast episode Paul recorded on the Zend Developer Zone site.

Today's special guest is Paul M. Jones. Paul is an internationally-recognized expert PHP developer and technical consultant living in Memphis, TN. On his blog, he writes mostly about his software projects, but also touches on management, business, politics, and culture.

You can grab the show directly or subscribe to the feed to get this and more great shows from the podcast (with topics covered like PHP & Java, CodeIgniter, Security and much more)

Fluent Interfaces are not a new programming construct. However, PHP developers have not been able to use them until PHP 5. Now with PHP 5 and the ability to directly dereference an object, PHP developers can build objects using fluent interfaces.

He starts off with a look at what they are and how (and why) they can be used in an application. He includes code example to help show how you would create an interface (makeNormal).

• this article by Mike Naberezny
• a post from Paul Jones
• a blog post from Martin Fowler