PHP 5.4 alpha3 is available for testing now. Please give us a hand and compile it on your platform and run a "make test". Download it from http://qa.php.net and you can see the changes in the NEWS file at http://t.co/bBVGj8P

Updates in this alpha include the shortened array syntax, binary numbers format, support for the "Class::{expr}()" syntax, removal of magic quotes related features, a change to include E_STRICT in E_ALL and several others. Head over to the PHP QA site and download this latest version to test in your environment. Remember, environments are unique, so the more test results the better - it helps make for a better quality end result.

The Zend Framework team would like to thank everyone who made this release possible. As always, our generous ZF community has provided countless new features, bug fixes, documentation translations, etc. We'd also like to thank Adobe Systems and Wade Arnold for contributing the new Zend_Amf component. A big thanks to PHP Belgium and everyone who participated in bug hunt day and/or the Zend Framework bug hunt week.

This update includes lots of new components and features such as: an update to Dojo, Zend_Service_Twitter, support for Open Office Documents in the Zend_Search_Lucene component, Zend_ProgressBar, I18N improvements and much, much more. Check out the full list on this post on the Zend Developer Zone or just head over the download the latest edition.

You can also check out some of Matthew Weier O'Phinney's comments over on his blog as well as thoughts from Zend's own Andi Gutmans on his blog.

This release will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0RC3, which is likely to be the last RC. Please report any trouble you find, and post your feedback (here, on the pecl-dev mailing list or in the issue tracker), it will help provide the best possible extension in the 5.2.0 release. A stable filter release should still hit the road this year.

Feature additons for this release include an input_get_args method, support for PHP's pcre expressions, JIT support, and support for custom decimal spacers. Several behaviors were changed as well, including when a value is FALSE or NULL, updates to the integer/float parser, and the default filter now being set to "raw".

You can get the complete listing of updates on the project from the Changelog and check out the project and all of its documentation on it's PECL homepage.

If you watch the timeline, you probably noticed the important number of updates of these last days. If you opened a ticket, you also probably noticed that more than 160 tickets were fixed since 0.6.3. There are a lot of changes in symfony lately (see the changelog for the full list), and here is a brief overview of the important stuff.

Included in the list are things like:

• Many-to-many relationships
• New CLI tasks
• AJAX actions have no layout by default
• my* Classes
• Validators

Zend Technologies has announced new versions of Zend Core for IBM and Oracle. Both Zend Core for IBM and Zend Core for Oracle can install Apache-2.0.50-Server and work with PHP 5.1.4. Further, Zend has extended database and PHP functionalities with both versions.

Updates to the IBM Core include updates to the DB2, Cloudscape, and Informix functionality as well as updates to the ibm_db2 extension.

Updates for the Oracle Core include changes to the oci8-treiber and support for the Instant Client web applications.