Tobias Schlitt has a quick post to his blog about the release of the phpDocumentor for VIM project he's been working on over to github.

phpDocumentor for VIM (PDV) is a project which resulted from my efforts to create a comfortable programming environment for PHP in the VIM editor. Since the server which hosted the SVN repository is to be switched off the next days, I finally moved development over to github. In addition to that, I seized the chance to rename the project itself to VIP (VIM integration for PHP).

There's a few other goodies in the repository besides just the VIP tool. You can grab some (or all) of the code by following the instructions given on the github page.

Even before they've release the source for their much hyped HipHop PHP tool, Facebook has slipped another tool in under the radar and have already released it in github - XHP.

On the official announcement they describe what the tool is and what it can do for you:

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks. XHP does this by making PHP understand XML document fragments, similar to what E4X does for ECMAScript (JavaScript). While PHP is typically used to write front-end code, by itself it isn't a very good language for generating HTML (as evidenced by the popularity of templating engines like Smarty). XHP is something between a programmatic UI library and a full templating system

Rasmus Lerdorf took the opportunity to play with this new tool and run some benchmarks on its performance in a more real situation than the form example Facebook gave:

The real question here is what is this runtime xml validation going to cost you. [...] Note that to build XHP you will need flex 2.5.35 which most distros won't have installed by default. Grab the flex tarball and ./configure && make install it. Then you are ready to go.

He created a simple class (a "singleton") and ran some benchmarks against it with Siege. I won't share the results of those benchmarks here, though - you'll need to visit Rasmus' site for those (but here's a hint, the future's not bright).

Raphael Stolt has an interesting idea about PHPUnit plugin (GitHub_TicketListener) that allows you to close (or reopen) Github issues via PHPUnit tests.

Since PHPUnit 3.4.0 a new extension point for interacting with issue tracking systems [...]. The extension point has been introduced by an abstract PHPUnit_Extensions_TicketListener class, which allows developer to add tailor-made ticket listeners supporting their favoured TTS.

The "@ticket" notation that PHPUnit allows as an annotation is the key to linking together your unit tests with the new listener. Two methods, getTicketInfo and updateTicket, are used to have the listener make a cURL connection over to Github and send the request to a REST-like service on the remote side.

On the Symfony project blog there's a recent post from <>Fabien Potencier about the popular framework's development and source moving to a new home - github.

As you might have noticed if you follow me on Twitter (which you should do as I make a lot of small announcements there), or if you monitor the Subversion activity closely, the Symfony 2 code is now hosted on Git. [...] So, from now on, all the development activity for Symfony 2 will take place on the new Git repository.

He briefly covers what git is and a resource (book) he used to help understand this recently popular version control system. If you don't want to learn a new version control system but still want to contribute back with the subversion knowledge you're already armed with, you can still use their svn mirror to get the latest releases.

Sebastian Bergmann, developer of the PHPUnit unit testing software for PHP, has posted about a major move of the source code for the project over to github.

I was hearing more and more positive things about Git and GitHub from my peers. So I took the PHP_ObjectFreezer code base and migrated it to Git and hosted the repository and GitHub to experiment with both the tool and the platform. It was a step that I did not regret and all the projects that I started since then are hosted on GitHub: bytekit-cli, phpcpd, phpdcd, phploc, PHP_CodeCoverage, PHP_FileIterator, PHP_ObjectFreezer, Text_Template, PHP_TokenStream.

He explains some of his thinking behind the move and why he moved towards a distributed version control model rather than something like subversion. So, if you're looking for the latest sources for PHPUnit, you'll find them here. (He also includes the steps he took to import the code into github by making use of the svn2git tool).

In a recent blog post Konstantin take a look at some updates made to a Twitter OAuth library (TwitterOAuth) recently to make it even easier to use:

Just like everybody else, I never read the readme or other documentation files so I dug straight into the class code and examples. Soon after I realized that the new changes were not that bad, so instead of the usual 5 lines of code, I shortened it up to only one. I stopped worrying about parsing XML or JSON, converting them to objects, and I stopped typing in the full address for Twitter API calls. Abraham did all that for us.

It makes it simpler to use, but can break backwards compatibility, so watch out for that if you're using Abraham's library. If you're interested who's using the class, check out this page on his github wiki.

The PHP project has been making a major change lately - an upgrade of their version control system of choice from CVS to Subversion. They started the move the other day and now, according to this new post on the PHP.net website, the process has been completed.

The migration from CVS to Subversion is complete. The web interface is at svn.php.net. You can read about it at php.net/svn.php, wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq. The URL to feed to your svn client is http://svn.php.net/repository. There is also a github mirror. Please use that instead of trying to do a full git clone from the svn repository. See the instructions at wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq#git.

The instructions contain complete information on how to get and compile this "bleeding edge" (and what libraries you might need to install to get it up and working).

On the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen has posted about a new tool he's whipped up to handle dependency injections - Bucket.

I got fed up with the lack of a decent DI-container for PHP, so today I created Bucket. To be clear, what I think is wrong with the currently available containers (at least that I'm aware of) is that they either are unstable, abandoned, require a lot of up-front configuration in external XML-files, or are tightly integrated into some full-stack framework. I had my hopes up for Phemto for a while, but it seems that progress has stalled.

He includes a few bits of examples code in the post showing how to use type hinting, the factory method, callbacks and its support for child scopes. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can clone it from github.

If you're a fan of Planet-PHP (our fellow PHP news source) and have wanted to see how things run behind the scenes, you might want to check out this bit of information from Christian Stocker on where the source has ended up.

After Lukas asked me for the current Planet sources, I realized that I didn't really maintain the sources in the mentioned SVN repository anymore (for various reasons). So I decided to finally move them to GitHub. It makes much more sense there, since the most decent thing to do if you want to set up your own planet is to fork it and git (plus GitHub) makes that painlessly easy. Nevertheless I'm of course still interested in patches.

He warns that the code is a bit on the old side and that the framework its based on has officially been deprecated. If you're still interested, though, you can find (and clone) the application from its GitHub page.

Raphael Stolt has another post dealing with the Phing (PHP-based) build tool. This time he talks about making ad hoc tasks inside of your build scripts.

Sometimes there are build scenarios where you'll badly need a functionality, like adding a MD5 checksum file to a given project, that isn't provided neither by the available Phing core nor the optional tasks. [...] The following post will try to outline how to define and use these inline tasks, by sketching an ad hoc task that enables the build orchestra to clone Git repositories from GitHub during a hypothetical workbench setup.

He creates an example task - running a "clone" command via github - complete with the code for both sides of the feature; the PHP code to create the task and how to use it in your build file.