On NetTuts.com today they've posted a good primer for those that may have heard about the PSR standards that have been introduced to PHP but aren't quire sure what they are (or what they mean to you as a developer).

If you're an avid PHP developer, it's quite likely that you've come across the abbreviation, PSR, which stands for "PHP Standards Recommendation." At the time of this writing, there are four of them: PSR-0 to PSR-3. Let's take a look at what these are, and why you should care (and participate).

They start with a brief history of the standards, the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) and where the idea for the PSRs came from. Then the article gets into the details of each:

• PSR-0: Autoloader Standard
• PSR-1: Basic Coding Standard
• PSR-2: Coding Style Guide
• PSR-3: Logger Interface

They also do a good job mentioning some of the criticism that's come with the standards and what sort of future there is including the creation of a standard for a HTTP messaging package.

Engine Yard has recently posted two podcasts looking at the "Future of PHP" as it relates to two of the popular PHP frameworks out there - CakePHP and Zend Framework 2, as interviewed by Davey Shafik.

The first episode is an interview with some of the core ZF2 contributors about the framework and where they think it's headed. They cover the planned roadmap, targets for next year involving PHP 5.4 and 5.5 as well as how it compares to other frameworks out there today.

In the second episode Davey talks with some of the core contributors (and big fans) of the CakePHP framework. They talk about the current state of the framework, changes in the upcoming version and what it's like working with the PHP-FIG (framework interoperability group).

You can listen to each of these via their in-page players or drop their RSS feed into your reader and get these and the latest episodes of the "Cloud Out Loud" podcast as soon as they're released.

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 the Pro Developer site today there's a new post looking at the past and future of FuelPHP a framework started by Dan Horigan and Phil Sturgeon (who have both since left the team).

FuelPHP was first framework which used namespaces and was production ready at the same time. Small footprint, flexibility, namespaces, modularity and other gears make this framework great for building web applications. [...] For FuelPHP team 2012 was year with ups and downs. Dan Horigan was not available for his team members few months and no one didn't know where he was. He show up on the twitter and then he was unreachable again. WanWizard (Harro Verton) and Jelmer Schreuder were most active at the building FuelPHP core and they done a great job.

He takes a look at the road ahead (FuelPHP v2) and the work that's already been done on it. He also notes that another of the core team members has left the FuelPHP development group a few days ago and that there were some things about the framework he no longer liked. The post suggests looking into something like Laravel (v4, not yet released) if you're shopping for a new framework. He does note that, while the future of FuelPHP may be rocky, it is a stable framework and is still a solid choice for a platform (especially if it's already in use).

Luc Perkins (of AppFog) has written up a new post with some of his thoughts in response to the PHP The Right Way project.

A few months back, I decided that I was going to learn PHP. [...] The reality that I discovered wasn't at all what I expected. Sure, there was plenty of spaghetti code out there (there's also plenty of spaghetti code in C++, Java, take your pick…), but there were also a variety of frameworks and communities devoted to using PHP to all kinds of productive ends. I was also surprised at just how much of the internet runs on PHP. I guess that something like a third of the internet up and decided to quietly not mind the haters.

He goes on to talk about a previous post of his supporting PHP and how, despite the negative comments on it, was still encouraged to learn more about the language. In his research, he came across The Right Way and was surprised and encouraged by the work and support the community is putting into it.

I think it's clear how best to respond to the group's provocation: if you're looking to make bold claims about what PHP necessarily is and isn't, don't make those claims on the basis of tutorials or blog posts written by PHP beginners. Ask people who are seasoned veterans in the language and in its corresponding best practices. They're the ones who fully understand PHP's breadth and power.

Nikita Popov has looked ahead to the future of PHP in a new post to his blog , thinking about what PHP 5.5 might be like and what features could be included.

PHP 5.4 was released just four months ago, so it probably is a bit too early to look at the next PHP version. Still I'd like to give all the people who aren't following the internals mailing list a small sneak peak at what PHP 5.5 might look like.

He's looking at the proposed functionality, not finalized features, so some of it might not make it in. He mentions things like:

• Windows XP and 2003 support dropped
• boolval()
• hash_pbkdf2()
• array_column()
• Constant dereferencing
• Parameter skipping
• Scalar typehinting

The Bakery (the CakePHP site) has posted a list of things to come in the 3.0 release of the popular PHP framework.

Since its creation, more than 7 years ago, CakePHP has grown with a life of its own. Its main goal has always been to empower developers with tools that are both easy to learn and use, leverage great libraries requiring low documentation and low dependencies too. We've had several big releases along these years and an ever growing community. Being one of the most popular frameworks out there and probably the first one (!) we have also gotten a lot of criticism from the developer community in general. We have, though, accepted it and learnt from our mistakes to keep building the best PHP framework there is.

Some of the coming improvements include:

• Drop support for 5.2.x and support 5.4+ only
• Use traits were possible and makes sense
• Model layer rewrite
• Improve Router
• Improve bootstrapping process to allow more developer control and better performance

You can find more about the current features of the framework on it's main project site.

Engine Yard has released the audio from a recent (webcast) panel discussion they did about the Future of PHP with members of the PHP community (a part of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series).

Elizabeth Naramore talks with David Soria Parra, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Stas Malyshev for a panel discussion about Internals. Our panel of experts will share their thoughts and predictions about the existing PHP landscape, and what is to come.

It's about 30 minutes long and they talk about PHP 5.4, compiling PHP, performance issues, the slow rate of adoption in newer releases, memory usage and some of the general strengths and weaknesses of the language. Elizabeth also asks each person on the panel about things they've each seen done wrong on the project and something they'd like to see in its future.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

On the Oracle Technology Network today there's a new article from Rasmus Lerdorf about the current release of the language (PHP 5.4) and what he sees as the future for PHP.

Almost exactly eight years ago I wrote an article for the Oracle Technology Network called, "Do You PHP?". In that article, I talked about PHP's stubborn, function-over-form approach to solving the "Web problem" and the fight to keep things simple. We were getting close to releasing PHP 5.0 at the time. Now here we are almost a decade later with a shiny new PHP 5.4.0 release, and while much has happened during that time, there are also many things that haven't changed at all.

The first talks about what's the same - the ecosystem surrounding the language and the strength of the LAMP stack that PHP helped to "found". He mentions some of the up-and-comers that are alternatives to this traditional setup and some of the extensions that have been added to improve PHP's functionality (DateTime, PDO, JSON support). He talks about other improvements in the language including:

• Better memory management
• Traits
• Short Array Syntax
• Closure binding
• Built-in webserver
• Native session handler interface
• Removal of register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode

He briefly looks ahead at "what's next" for the language and points to the "internals" mailing list and the PHP wiki

On the php|architect site today there's a new article from Luke Stokes asking a question about the future of the web (and web serivces) - is the future in REST or SOAP?

I was recently asked why we chose REST over SOAP for our re-write of the FoxyCart.com API, and the short answer that immediately came to mind was, "Because I don't hate myself". To expand on that answer, let me give you a little bit of the back story.

He talks about their goals for the product and its API, how they wanted to create something useful, built by developers for developers. They leaned towards REST mostly because of the problems and overhead introduced with SOAP (and the complex nature of its requests). He also gives a few reasons why he's "excited about REST": working with known data types, standard interface methods and the fact that it's still such a hot topic of discussion.

These questions [about HATEOS, hypermedia, vendor-specific content types] might seem overwhelming, but for us they are exciting! We believe the future of consistent, powerful API development is being defined right now, and we get to be a part of it.