In a new post on the IBM developerWorks page, Nathan Good takes a look at some of the features of the up and coming versions of the PHP language including things like namespaces, changes in the XML handling and a few things taken out.

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

New features he mentions include namespace support, improvements to the native Unicode support as well as a few of the things that will be permanently retired like the php.ini settings for magic_quotes and register_globals.

On his blog, Padraic Brady has posted his thoughts on the Zend Framework and what the latest release of it, ZF v1.5, means for its future in the web development world.

With 1.5, everything that makes the framework attractive has quite simply been boosted. We now have a fully comprehensive complex view aggregation/templating system to play with, we have a forms component, translations are integrated as view helpers. Just rattling off several new features is enough to pull together just how comprehensive and cohesive the framework has become over it's 1.0 predecessor. It's that significant.

He talks about things like Zend_Layout and additions to Zend_Form as well as the community around the framework and some of the places that the framework and its process are still lacking a bit.