As was previously mentioned by Christopher Jones, the PHP 5.3 branch is now under a feature freeze. Lukas Smith has posted a few more details about the upcoming release.

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less.

New features will have to go through either him or Johannes to be included and they are doing their best to get the alpha 1 release of this new version out by July 31st.

Lukas is also trying a more unconventional approach to bug fixes to try to get the major ones knocked out first - posting them as a comment to this blog post. So far, no comments on bugs have been added, but there are a good number to get through. To help narrow it down he's also put out a plea to developers out there to help validate current bugs to potentially knock off a few of the ones that can be marked bogus.

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

Alexander Netkachev has points to an announcement about the latest code freeze for the Zend Framework preceding the release of the 0.9 version of the framework by Bill Karwin.

In a couple of days, the Zend Framework project reaches the most important milestone in its development. On Thursday March 15, 9:00pm PDT, we will declare a code-freeze for the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. After a day or so of integration testing, we will release Zend Framework 0.9.0 Beta.

The main difference between this release and some of the previous is that, with the release of this new beta version, the Zend Framework is (functionally) ready to be declared a stable 1.0 status. The stable release is currently scheduled to be released at the end of March 2007.

There's some great news from the Zend Developer Zone today - an announcement about the code freeze that's happened for the latest version of the Zend Framework:

We are in the final week of development for Zend Framework Preview Release 0.6.0! We are on schedule to call a code-freeze on Friday December 15. [...] The code-freeze for 0.6.0 should be lifted by Monday December 18.

Some of the improvements in the upcoming version include a more mature MVC environment, architecture changes to several modules, new components, and much more. Be sure to keep an eye on the Framework's website and here for an update when the new Preview Release has been posted.