In this post to his site Derick Rethans talks about some major updates that have been made to the MongoDB drivers for both PHP and HHVM users.

We recently released a new version of the MongoDB driver for PHP. This release is the result of nearly a year and a half work to re-engineer and rewrite the MongoDB driver. In this blog post, I will cover the back story of the how and why we undertook this effort.

He starts back with the original driver (in 2009), the features it offered and how it was structured. He talks about the evolution of the functionality to more of a C PHP extension and when it reached the v1.0.0 milestone. From there he talks about updates made to the JSON handling, features added in 1.3 and some of the larger design issues they ran up against making future development much more difficult. He ends the post with an overview of their goals for this new driver version and a promise for a following post with more details on this structure.