On the KingFoo blog today there's an excellent look at everything new coming up in PHP 5.4, the next version of PHP set to be released in early February.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

On The Tutorial Blog today they've shared a library that you can use on your CodeIgniter application to help give your forms a bit more security - a math problem "captcha".

The class that we are going to create within CI will simply add a math question that the user will have to enter correctly to continue. This is useful to stop bots from mass submitting information to your forms. The class we are going to write is only very short and simple, but it will give you an idea of how to create classes for your own projects.

Their class creates two random numbers to be used for the question, displays the question the user should answer (Ex. "What is 2 + 4?") and sets the answer in the flashdata, ready for the page submit. When the controller reloads, the answer the user gave and the one from the flash are compared as a part of the standard form validation rules.

Recently the eZ Systems group had their eZ Awards ceremony at this year's Open Nordic Conference 2008. Derick Rethans has a brief post about the ceremony and the nominees/winner of the eZ Components award.

Last Thursday, during the Open Nordic Conference 2008 eZ Systems handed out its annual awards again. For the eZ Components award, there were four nominees, which are all recognised for their support of the eZ Components project.

Nominees included Stefan Marr and Falko Menge, James Pic, Andreas Schamberger and Freddie Witherden. The winner was James Pic for his work with the upcoming MVC additions to the component framework.

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone and by John Herren, Yahoo! has added a new feature to its Pipes functionality - serialized PHP results.

Until now JSON output has been the only way to obtain all the data flowing through a Pipe. Starting today we've added a second way of getting all the data - serialized PHP Pipe output. [...] It's then up to you on how you want to display or use the Pipe data. The possibilities are endless.

If you haven't messed with Yahoo's Pipes system, you owe to it to yourself to at least go and play with it for a little bit.

On his blog, Dan Scott notes that the PHP language will be getting a native doubly-linked list structure in the coming days (as mentioned by Etienne Kneuss).

This is fabulous news; when I wrote the File_MARC PEAR package, I ended up having to implement a linked list class in PEAR to support it.

Doubly linked lists are normal lists, but the elements also have links to both the previous and next items in the list as well. Two other structures will be added right along with it - SplStack and SplQueue.

Padraic Brady has posted some of his comments on the newly included Zend_Layout and Zend_View_Enhanced components for the Zend_Framework:

These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View.

Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.

He thanks the developers (Matthew and Ralph) and notes that the inclusion of these two components is one of the largest advancements of the display layer for the Framework in a while.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted an addition to his previous look at exceptions in CakePHP with a modification that uses assertions instead of an if to check the value of a variable.

I suddenly remembered what assertions are and how they could make my code more readable, while making it shorter. I took a quick look at PHP's assert function, but decided that I don't like it. [...] What I ended up doing was basically to create a class called Assert, and abuse it as a name-space for a whole bunch of useful assertion functions.

He includes two examples of how this new class would look, checking to see if a value is empty and to see if a task ID exists in a given value. The code for the assertion class is also included and has methods for checking things like "not empty", "equals to", "is not numeric" and "is an object". And, no, it's not CakePHP specific, so you could take it an use it anywhere.

On Pierre's blog today, there's a release announcement about the "long awaited for" version of his Filter extension - version 0.1.0.0.

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.