HP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

You can find out more about the package and download this latest edition from its PECL page or check out the whitepaper they recent;y wrote up about PHP and Oracle scalability.

The CakePHP team is gearing up to finally push out a stable 1.2 release! If you are following the trac timeline you can see that everybody is putting in huge amounts of work to fix bugs and get everything stable.

He suggests a few ways to get involved in helping to push this release out the door like writing test cases, showing how to replicate bugs and help out the documentation team with their efforts to keep the manual up to date.

About the Zend Framework 1.0.4 release:

It is our pleasure to announce the release of Zend Framework 1.0.4! You can download this new mini-release now from the Zend Framework download site. With this mini-release we bid a fond farewell to the 1.0 branch as we move on to the 1.5 release.

And about the Release Candidate:

This obviously marks a very important step towards a high-quality, thoroughly tested 1.5 GA release. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release in any way: with patches/check ins, documentation/translations, and bug reports.

You can grab this new Candidate from the download site as well.

This is the package's first stable release. Chuck Hagenbuch started the library as an adaptation of Spyc around six months ago. Since then, he and I have been quietly using and improving it. Along the way, we fixed many issues, added support for pecl/syck, and wrote a test suite with PHPUnit.

You can find the latest download of the package over on the Horde PEAR channel and you can find out more about the YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) spec over on the Yaml.org website.

When we officially started on 5.2 in March of 2006, we had several goals. I think we achieved most of those. We also accomplished some unplanned things. Our hackathon (me and maurice slept about 8 hours in 4 days I think) at MySQL Conference 2007 helped a lot. Remember, you can help us get there again by donating to our fund.

Updates include a new template for the forum, new PAI layers and more hooks to call them, better MySQL support, improved bundled modules, a new announcement system and a new, restructured search functionality.

If out more about the release here and more about the Phorum software here.

PHPSpec is closing in on its first stable release, so the time had finally come to spruce up its output! No more the simple reporting of failed specs - now you get a few more details in a readable format, exceptions and errors even come with traces. In addition, I've implemented specdoc output as an option (using "-s") so you can get a list of specs in their plain text form.

He's also included an example of the new output in the post as well, showing the results of both successful and errored responses. You can check out the actual spec files on the googlecode repository for the project and get more details on the project itself (including the latest development snapshots) on the project's website.

The PhpDocumentor team would like to announce the release of PhpDocumentor version 1.4.0 through SourceForge and pear.php.net. This is the first stable feature release since 2006.

This new release adds in functionality for new tags for "magic" properties and methods, some new runtime options (like ignoresymlinks and undocumentedelements) and puts a new memory_limit option on the ini file to help keep it more under control.

You can grab the latest download either through a "pear upgrade" or directly from the project's SourceForge site. Their latest post also includes the complete Changelog for more details on the updates.

During the development of mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP - an alternative to libmysql, a good number of new tests have been written. Let's see how ext/mysql and ext/mysqli perform when running the test suite. Please note that this is a snapshot and figures might be slightly different when you repeat the test runs: mysqlnd is under constant development and your setup is likely to differ from mine.

I won't spoil the results of the benchmarks, but it is worth mentioning that he includes the configure options if you'd like to repeat the testing on your own systems.

The PhpDocumentor team hopes to release the final 1.4.0 stable feature release on 7/20. If you have test-driven any of the recent pre-releases for 1.4.0 (alpha1, alpha2, RC1, RC2), please let us know any good/bad feedback you have from that experience.

Several Changelog entries are http://www.phpdoc.org.

Many thanks to the scores of PHP developers who have worked for many months to make this product milestone possible. Zend Framework has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible. Zend Framework is now the best class library available for PHP 5 web application development.

The Zend Framework project has developed solutions to solve frequent needs of web application developers

You can download this latest version from the Framewrok's website and check out the Changelog for the full list of updates.

Here's a few links to other's talking about the release:

• the announcement on the Zend Developer Zone
• Patrick Reilly
• Andi Gutmans (of Zend)
• Jason Gilmore on the Inside Open Source blog
• the post from php|architect
• a post from Pádraic Brady
• a blog entry from Rob Allen
• the official press release from Zend
• a post from Jonathan Snook
• this new post on the Symfony framework's blog
• an article from InternetNews.com
• a post on Ilimitado.de about the release