A new entry has been posted to the PEAR blog with the latest minutes for the group's July 13th meeting.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

Henrik continues his look at fluent arrays and strings in PHP with this second part of his series, adding JSON functionality into the mix.

Recently I've had the need to extend the interface further, among other things with JSON support. I've used code published by Nicolas Crovatti to do this.

His example shows how the script works to plot out some points for a table of stats. He follows this with an in-depth look at the different methods making up that fluent call (apply2Field, fill_ret, sum and plot). These make the array that can then be passed off to PHP, using json_encode to make an easy-consumable JSON message out of the results.

Today on the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen reminds the community about a "one-stop resource" that they can use to keep up to date on some of the latest happenings with the PHP language, the PHP.net wiki.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

Chris Hartjes has made made a few comments on his blog about things going on in the online world - two of which pertain to PHP:

• Closures and lambdas coming to PHP - he mentions the addition of lambdas and closures into the next major version of PHP (5.3) and his thoughts on how they've been abused in the past.
• The Framework Jihad:

  If you substitute "modularized code with standardized API" for "framework", would that make people feel better? I use frameworks because so much of the infrastructure code is stuff I DO NOT WANT TO WRITE ANY MORE. After 10 years of doing this, it's time I stopped reinventing things. My old motto of "just build it, damnit!"

Check out his post for a bit more complete versions of these thoughts.

Over on the PHP Zone (from the DZone community site) there's a in-depth tutorial looking at the creation and management of an access control system (users, passwords and what they can do) in your PHP application. It's an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development.

Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. So in this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model role-based access control and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software. To show what is going on, the example of a file repository extension is used.

They talk about some of the general considerations about access control (limiting the number of rules, common difficulties) and plenty of code/database schema to get you started.

Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

In his "newbie findings" posted to his blog today, David Goodwin recounts his efforts to get SOAP an XML-RPC up and working with his PHP5 project and the wealth of documentation he found.

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere. This is just a documentation of what I/we as "newbies" found ...

Resources in the list include things like the SCA SDO module from PECL, some examples of its usage, where it is used, what kind of transport layer the protocol allows and some of the functionality that the Zend Framework allows (including some sample code for a simple server and client).

In a new post to the Developer Tutorials blog Akash Mehta takes a look at migrating PHP4 applications up to the more recent versions of PHP5.

PHP 5 supports most of the legacy syntax features of PHP 4. Most code written for PHP 4 should function fine under PHP 5, and a comprehensive test suite could check this. However, many of the backwards-incompatible changes in PHP 5 were in regard to language quirks, and quite a few hacks rely on these in order to function.

He points out some of these hacks including changes to the object model and updates to the way variables are handled (breaking many "bad use" cases). He also points out the changes made in the latest Windows binaries as well as some of the new reserved keywords that could conflict with pre-existing code in your application.

As Ivo Jansch pointed out yesterday it's a month until the fateful day that PHP4 will officially die:

It's July the 8th. Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

August 8th marks the point when nothing (at all) will be done to any version of PHP4 again. Full support ended back in December of 2007 with no new versions being released. 8-8-08 marks the end of that as well and PHP4 developers that discover bugs may not be able to get them fixed.

Ivo sums it it perfectly:

I'm not trying to scare you. No wait, I am. Don't let 8-8-8 become the PHP community's 6-6-6 and abandon PHP4 while you still can.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!