As is mentioned in this new post to DZone.com, one of the features of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release, including things like traits and array dereferencing support, will also have an interesting new feature - a built-in simple web server.

Yet another new feature to look forward to in PHP 5.4.0 - the CLI SAPI will now provide a built-in web server which is geared toward developmental purposes. It shouldn't be used in production right now.

The PHP manual has been updated with the latest on this upcoming feature:

URI requests are served from the current working directory where PHP was started, unless the -t option is used to specify an explicit document root. [...] If a PHP file is given on the command line when the web server is started it is treated as a "router" script for the web server. The script is run at the start of each HTTP request. If this script returns FALSE, then the requested resource is returned as-is. Otherwise the script's output is returned to the browser.

The PHP 5.4.x series is still in beta as of the time of this post - you can download the beta1 on the downloads section of the PHP site (or the Windows binaries).

As is mentioned in this new post by Paul Jones the Solar framework project has reached its "beta" status on December 18th, 2009 and has just hit another milestone - beta2.

Along with the release comes updates to the manual including a new blog tutorial that walks you through the creation of a simple blog that shows you how create the basic application structure, add actions/views for the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of articles and work with local strings.

If you're looking for what changed in the two betas, check out the release notes for beta1 and beta2 (download link for the beta2 release).