Lukas Smith has a new post to his site that asks the question "what's needed to REST in Symfony 2?" In it he talks about some of the current issues surrounding REST support in Symfony (bundles) and a "call to arms" to create something better.

I think we already have quite a nice toolchain for REST in Symfony2 with Bundles like FOSRestBundle, JMSSerializerBundle, NelmioApiDocBundle, FSCHateoasBundle and HautelookTemplatedUriBundle. What is great about these Bundles is that they are all nicely integrated with each other. But there are still some limitations which should be addressed.

Some of the still outstanding issues he points out include issues with content-type and routing, dynamic content in the NelmioApi bundle, Behat context testing, JSONP support and more. He suggests gathering together a product backlog of these items and possibly making a kickstarter to fund its development.

Fabien Potencier (of the Symfony framework) has a new post to his site talking about a philosophy that the Symfony framework community should work towards, providing stability over features.

Long story short: in the coming months, the Symfony core contributors should focus their efforts toward stabilizing the existing features instead of working on new ones. At this point, backward compatibility and stability are more important than everything else.

He highlights some of the points that come along with this effort including less refactoring for the sake of refactoring, fixing more bugs/edge cases and writing more tests/documentation. He gets into some of the specifics of this kind of thinking and points out the things that can and can't be changed during this time. He talks more about stability and suggests that not only can it help enhance performance but it could also help motivate more projects/corporate users to start using the framework.

In this recent post to his site Phil Sturgeon has a reminder that you should select the dependencies for your packages wisely, and not just because they're "cool."

When I say "make sure it is worth it" I mean, don't just switch your arrays from array() to [] just because it looks cool. That was the extent of my original tweet, because I've seen a few packages doing that and it annoyed me immensely. [...] Suffice it to say, if you require a user to upgrade their version of PHP simply so you can use some syntactical sugar inside a package that nobody else is even going to be looking at, then you're an idiot. Beyond that, you're actually hurting the community.

He notes that, by requiring users that are currently only at 3.1% of PHP installs to upgrade to 5.4 just to use your library is a quick way to not have your library used. He points out that PHP 5.4 is "more than just []" for arrays and includes a reminder that several projects are still in PHP 5.3-compatibility mode just because that's the widest audience. He also briefly touches on the "push it forward" comments that people have used to justify 5.4-only packages, but notes that it's still not as much up to the developer as it is the web host.

Michael Kimsal has just released the latest episode of his WebDevRadio podcast series, Episode 108: "New Ruby, Regex and my Framework Security Rant(tm)". His framwork security comments are related to PHP frameworks and why almost none of them seem to come with security features already included.

Ruby 2 was just released, and the new 'refinements' feature presents some interesting challenges for JRuby and just about anyone wanting to read Ruby code. Brief chat about the regex security affecting Rails back in January, but more broadly speaking, what does this say about regex in general? Should we embrace it, or find better alternatives? Finally, I've got a new blog post up about web framework security - why do (almost) no web frameworks ship with security baked-in?

The podcast references some of the thoughts from his recent post about framework security. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

Lars Strojny has a new post that takes an in-depth look at the current state of functional programming in PHP:

PHP has traditionally been a simple, procedural language that took a lot of inspiration from C and Perl. Both syntax wise and making sure function signatures are as convoluted as possible. PHP 5.0 introduced a proper object model but you know all of that already. PHP 5.3 introduced closures and PHP 5.4 improved closures very much (hint: $this is available per default).

He starts by defining functional programming for those not familiar with the concept. With this understanding, he looks at what PHP has to offer that will help make this definition a reality, things like call_user_func_array and closures. He includes some code examples comparing the PHP structures to other languages and their features (like Haskell and Ruby). The post also gets a bit more practical with a "real world" example of a script that calculates the totals from the set of items in a shopping cart using a helper library to do some of the basic functional handling.

PHP.net has announced the release of PHP 5.5 alpha3, the latest alpha in this upcoming release. This is only a preview release and should not be considered (in any way, shape or form) as usable in production.

The PHP development team announces the release of PHP 5.5.0alpha3. This release adds few features and fix some bugs from alpha2. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

There's a few new things that have come with this update including the "Generator::throw()" method, a few additional cURL methods, Max-Age attribute support in setcookie and some bugfixes in mysqlnd and the PHP core code (see here for the full list). Please download this latest alpha and test it out in your application. Windows binaries are here.

In this new post to PHPMaster.com today Alexander Cogneau takes a look at what's different in version four (v4) of the Laravel framework as it has changed from version three.

Laravel is a PHP framework which uses the MVC pattern. Of course, there are many such projects and I'm not going to compare Laravel with other frameworks in this article. Instead, I'm going to share with you what's new in the newest version of Laravel - Laravel 4.

There's a list of things that have changed (each with a summary of what they are):

• Decoupled Components
• Creating a "Normal" Project
• Routes
• Better Code through Testing
• The Container and Its Bindings
• Improved CLI
• New Database Features
• Using Stand-Alone Components

On NetTuts.com today there's a new article from Gabriel Manricks looking in to the future of the PHP language at what's slated to be included in PHP 5.5., the next major release.

The first PHP 5.5 alpha has been publicly released. After having some time to test and experiment with it, we can now bring you our in-depth overview of what to look forward for!

He walks you through the installation (compiling, not via packages) of this latest release once you've downloaded it. He then goes down the list of features, some of which are pretty recent additions to the planned release including: generators, lists in foreach, the new password API, cURL updates (SMTP) and a few smaller updates.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial introducing you to namespaces in PHP and a complete guide to the features that come with them.

It's been a bumpy ride, in regards to namespace support in PHP. Thankfully, it was added to the language in PHP 5.3, and the applicable structure of PHP code has improved greatly since then. But how exactly do we use them?

They start with a definition of a namespace (for those unfamiliar with the term) and get right into the code showing their use in PHP:

• Defining a Namespace (and Sub-namespaces)
• Calling Code from a Namespace (using Unqualified/Qualified/Fully Qualified names)
• Dynamic calls
• The namespace Keyword
• Aliasing or Importing

In this discussion on Reddit, there's talk about the user comments feature on the PHP.net site and the value they provide to the language and community.

The question, however, has always been "how useful is this feature really and does it bring more harm than good?". It's not that easy to answer since there are so many notes submitted by a wide range of users and some will likely go unnoticed while others seem to get undue attention due to their positioning near the top of the user-notes section of a particularly trafficked page.

The poster proposes a few things that could help make them a bit more effective (and useful overall) including voting on the note contents, flagging potential issues and sorting the notes based on popularity/age. He's put together a proof of concept as seen here with some of the new features.