Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

Alex Netkachov has posted some of his own thoughts about Microsoft's recent SQL server 205 driver for PHP:

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

Jeff Moore has posted and shared an interesting graph showing something I'd never thought about comparing one language versus another on - the number of keywords it uses.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

Greg Beaver has announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.