On the Inviqa Tech Blog Ben Longden has posted a Year in Review of PHP and the community, including some of the major trends that came into their own last year (2012).

Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

Brian Swan (of Microsoft) has a new post to his blog talking about what SQL Server 2012 means for PHP developers - what the latest version of this MS database has to offer and how to get a basic install up and working in your environment.

Last week, Microsoft held a virtual conference to announce the availability of SQL Server 2012. The conference included a number of events (speakers, videos, training activities, etc.) that focused on the new functionality available in this release. Now that most of the fanfare has died down a bit, I’d like to take a look at what some of that new functionality means for PHP developers. Combined with the release of the Microsoft Driver for SQL Server for PHP, I think the SQL Server 2012 release makes some big improvements in developing PHP/SQL Server applications.

He includes instructions on getting the latest version set up with the SQL Server Express LocalDB (and command line tools). He mentions only a few of the new things this latest version has to offer - easier pagination with OFFSET/FETCH NEXT, client-side cursors and other things like "AlwaysOn Connectivity" and the PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES constant.