On the Sculpin blog Beau Simensen has posted an update about a change in how the project will be released in the future, most notably deprecating the phar release and switching to an embedded Composer installation.

If you are currently using a globally installed phar distribution for Sculpin you should migrate to a per-project Composer installed version of Sculpin as soon as you can. [...] Any plans for Sculpin 3 would have required reworking the phar build and distribution process

In typical programmer fashion, I let myself get bogged down in the details of eventually needing to deploy Sculpin 3 phar builds rather than working on Sculpin 3. What little time I had to spend on Sculpin last year was sunk on solving this problem. [...] The last officially available Sculpin phar is not compatible with PHP 7.

He talks about his earlier goals to make v3 of Sculpin PHP 7-only but, in the process of the work to get to that point, several roadblocks came up preventing it. He talks about self-updating phars and finally realizing that, for the good of the project, a move to the embedded Composer setup is the best method for keeping dependencies in sync. He ends the post with the steps you'll need to take to migrate from the phar release to the managed version and an example commit of how the Sculpin site itself was migrated.

In this new post to his site Volker Dusch talks about some of his first experiences with the Silex microframework (from the folks behind Symfony) and the evolution his code went through in its first few versions.

A couple of weeks ago Igor wrote a fantastic blog post about “Scaling a Silex code base” which made me remember a story I wanted to share about how I fell in love with Silex. This blog post aims to tell that story. If you never heard of Silex is let me paste the blurp from the silex home page for you: “Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP 5.3. It is built on the shoulders of Symfony2 and Pimple and also inspired by Sinatra.”

He talks about some of his "first steps" with the framework and their need for a smaller system that could run embedded on a local machine. He talks about how Silex let him rapidly prototype and develop the application with only what was needed. He shows the evolution of his route handling from simple closures to method calls on objects out to using providers.

The Ibuildings techPortal has published two new episodes of their DPC09 Sessions podcast today - one from Sebastian Bergmann and the other from Michal Wittke.

>Sebastian's talk covered the internals of the PHP language and gave a step by step tour though how the code is parsed and executed. You can either listen to this episode via the in-page player or via the mp3 download

The next episode is Michael Wittke's talk in getting PHP up and running on embedded devices like web-enabled cameras or mobile devices. As with the previous episode, you can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

The International PHP Magazine has published the results of this past week's poll that asked "Which is truest?" (or "which of the options given about PHP is the most correct).

The International PHP Magazine conducted a poll over the week, asking for your opinion regarding the truest statement. The poll results with the respective percentages are as shown in the screen cast.

Of the options given, only one stood out above the rest - "PHP is Easy to Learn" - definitely a true statement. As far as the rest, they were close, but "PHP code gets embedded in HTML pages" came in second.

Be sure to check out the new poll question for the week - "You Did Not Know That..." (selecting which of the little known facts about PHP you didn't know).

The International PHP Magazine has published the results of this past week's poll that asked "Which is truest?" (or "which of the options given about PHP is the most correct).

The International PHP Magazine conducted a poll over the week, asking for your opinion regarding the truest statement. The poll results with the respective percentages are as shown in the screen cast.

Of the options given, only one stood out above the rest - "PHP is Easy to Learn" - definitely a true statement. As far as the rest, they were close, but "PHP code gets embedded in HTML pages" came in second.

Be sure to check out the new poll question for the week - "You Did Not Know That..." (selecting which of the little known facts about PHP you didn't know).

Joshua Eichorn is back today with the answers to the questions as posed by the readers of his blog previously.

Your AJAX answers from my AJAX questions post are below, I hope everyone finds them helpful.

The questions answered include:

• How can I find out whether a connection is broken?
• Why would you want to use HTML_AJAX when there are far better tools for the job, pure javascript solutions such as prototype or jquery?
• What is the best way to 'degrade' a website when Javascript/XMLHttpRequest support is disabled?
• When utilizing an AJAX API such as Google Maps, how do you execute embedded Javascript commands in a page generated on-the-fly?

...as well as a few more. Where appropriate, he also includes code to help illustrate his point.

Joshua Eichorn is back today with the answers to the questions as posed by the readers of his blog previously.

Your AJAX answers from my AJAX questions post are below, I hope everyone finds them helpful.

The questions answered include:

• How can I find out whether a connection is broken?
• Why would you want to use HTML_AJAX when there are far better tools for the job, pure javascript solutions such as prototype or jquery?
• What is the best way to 'degrade' a website when Javascript/XMLHttpRequest support is disabled?
• When utilizing an AJAX API such as Google Maps, how do you execute embedded Javascript commands in a page generated on-the-fly?

...as well as a few more. Where appropriate, he also includes code to help illustrate his point.