In this recent post to the PHP::Impact blog, Federico talks about a slightly scary thing - a version of PHP implemented 100% in Java.

Quercus allows developers to incorporate Java code into PHP web applications and gives both Java and PHP developers a fast, safe, and powerful alternative to the standard PHP interpreter.

He mentions what it supports - things like Unicode and several of the popular extensions like APC, GD, MySQL, Oracle and PDF). There's also benefits he points out like the speed of the libraries (and safety) as well as interoperability with Java code and frameworks. Check out the official Quercus website for more information.

After hearing Stefan Priebsch's talk at this year's Dutch PHP Conference, something occurred to Derick Rethans - there was a small sort of issue with using namespaces and possible future PHP's own namespace.

One of the things that came up is the conflicts that can arise with internal classes. In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop working

He offers a simple solution that can prevent this sort of conflict for the future - defining your "use" and then creating a new instance of the namespace into a variable instead of just an "as".

The Developer Tutorials blog has a recent post that talks about manipulating objects in PHP with the help of the iterators that the Standard PHP Library has to offer.

It's a generally accepted fact that more readable code is more maintainable and easier for other developers to pick up. [...] Today I'm going to take a look at object iteration, most commonly found in the Standard PHP Library, and explore using the Iterator interface to simplify looping.

The main part of the tutorial shows how to implement the Iterator interface of the SPL to create your own custom methods, theirs being a Database version with methodsfor rewinding, reading and getting the current record you're working with.

DevShed has posted the third part of their series looking at accessing the Yahoo! web services via PHP5 scripts. This time it's a focus on using the image search capabilities.

In this third chapter of the series, I'm going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.

Just like in previous articles of the series, they make a simple class that connect to the Yahoo! web services and request search details back about their queries (like "Madonna").

There's been a few posts about the upcoming namespace support in PHP from different bloggers in the community including:

• A post on the Stubbes blog by Frank Kleine and his discoveries of how the "use" keyword needs to be used in your applications
• A follow-up post from Frank as well correcting some of the problems in his first examples
• Some opinions from Richard Heyes on how useful they seem to him
• Brian Moon's comments on the level of traffic that the namespace discussion has been getting on the php.internals mailing list.

Right now there's so many ideas flying around about what namespaces should be and how they should be implemented that it'll be interesting to see which ideas finally come out on top.

Sean Coates has posted a new item on his blog today applauding Greg Beaver for comments made on the php.internals mailing list concerning the ongoing namespace deliberations.

In a time where php.internals is becoming more and more useless due to an increasingly poor signal to noise ratio, Greg has stepped up and intelligently addressed the ongoing namespace debate in a way that not only shows that he's done his homework, but delivers a much needed stomp onto the toes of many of the other posters, who, quite frankly, are talking out of their a$$es.

Greg has summarized things in a six point list of recommendations for the implementation of namespaces for the language (including some dangers of their potential use).

Gergely Hodicska has posted about some hacking he's down with the Zend_Acl package in the Zend Framework to make support for custom roles and resources.

I found that the base Zend_Acl package has some limitation/problem if you want to use it in a bigger real life project. Zend_Acl supports only logical roles, resources so I decided to extend it to allow using custom roles and resources which can represent existing entities (for example users/groups and topics in a database)

He talks some about the package and its current functionality, including the limitations he ran up against. He came up with a structure for what he wanted (seen here) and set out to extend the class, making an interface and implementing it with his own loading method.

His source code can be downloaded here.

Gergely Hodicska has posted part two of his look at the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In his previous post, he looked at namespacing, but in this new one he covers late static binding (mor einfo here).

In the second part we will deal with static late binding, which is a very exciting new feature in PHP 5.3 and which promise some really nifty code. :) This topic attracted attention after Zend Framework. There was a little outcry in the PHP blogosphere, that the ActiveRecord examples presented in this webcast can't work in PHP even with the version 5.2. Now with late static binding it is possible to implement this style of ActiveRecord almost correctly.

His post is an example of implementing the ActiveRecord (sort of) pattern, complete with code examples.

David Coaller has posted about a major change in the way namespaces will be implemented in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release - a change from using "import" to "use" for including a namespace in your code.

PHP Namespaces are no longer using the "import" keyword, this has been replaced to the keyword "use". Quite simple he ? There are a few reasons behind that move, but let's all drop the political reasons and say at least that many many projects in the open source world do use the import() function to do all sorts of weird imports, and it's just simpler to use "use".

He also links to the original email from Stanislav about the reasoning behind change. He's also updated his previous post to reflect the change.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a "wanted" sign over on his blog - he's looking for a PHP function to do two things:

• takes two strings as its input and
• returns a string with the differences between the two string in the same format as GNU diff would return for diff -u for two files that contain the respective strings.

Think you can help him out? Drop him a line...