The main PHP.net website has posted a list of people participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project on various PHP projects. These include:

• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

You can check out more information on the projects (including links to their individual pages) on this page of the Google Code website.

Kore Nordmann has written up some benchmarks of some of the more popular PHP image creation libraries testing their output times and results for generating the same image.

In my article series I showed several ways on how to create images with PHP, going into implementation details etc. Now I just want to provide a very rough overview on speed and quality of the extensions.

He ran them with some settings disabled to optimize things as they ran and came up with results pointing to Cairo being the fastest to generate and output the image. It also had the benefit of outputting an image with the highest quality of the five tested (Cairo, SVG, Flash and GD with and without supersampling). His benchmark code is also included.

Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.

As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.

Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.

While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.

My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal

He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks pointing out an extension for PHP that allows it to use the Cairo graphics library.

Cairo is the "next generation" vector graphics library for Linux and very cool to have it available in PHP. Also cool about the extension was created using PEAR::CodeGen_PECL, which Hartmut describes here: look Mum - no C! (well almost).

Harry also asks if, with the rise of new technologies like this, if it's time to make the move to deprecate GD from normal PHP use - at the same time, removing another hurdle in PHP's path towards being thread safe.