On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a post from editor Bruno Skvorc wondering if PHP and IoT have a future together. The "Internet of Things" (IoT) is a technology sector that has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years as more and more devices become internet-aware and connected.

It’s IoT Week at SitePoint! [...] A whole week of mostly IoT resources on every channel and, yes, that includes PHP. What? “PHP and IoT!? Surely you’re mistaken!”, you must be thinking. No, dear reader. PHP and IoT go well together – better than one might expect.

In this post, we’ll list some getting started resources. Throughout the remainder of the week, we’ll have some amazing hands on posts for you – everything from creating a drinks machine with PHP, to a real life alarm when a door in Minecraft opens (yes, really!) – and that’s just on our channel. Be sure to check out the others, too!

The remainder of the post is then broken down into two sections: hardware and software/tutorials. In each there's plenty of links to articles, libraries, pieces of IoT hardware (low level, not consumer) and various PHP libraries that can help you get integrated quickly.

On the AppDynamics blog there's a post from Omed Habib where he looks at the current state of security in the PHP language and makes predictions about the future of it in PHP and where the language might be heading.

In some ways security is an infinite game of chess on a board the size of the world. For every move you make, the hackers have a countermove ready. They are highly motivated to take what you have, so the game never ends; it just switches players once in awhile. In this final blog in the series, we are going to review the game board, with a look at the most recent changes to security in PHP 7 and earlier supported versions. Then, we’ll try to look a few moves ahead with predictions for the future of PHP security.

In the article he talks about PHP's popularity and how it has somewhat worked against it and its reputation when it comes to secure development. He covers PHP 7 and some of the security-related updates that came with it including:

• whitelisting classes on unserialize
• the cryptographically secure random number generator
• patches for buffer overflows and memory leaks

He ends the post looking at a possible future of the language based on comments made in this other article., suggesting that one possible place for the language to head is into the IoT (Internet of Things) space and interacting with the devices on the other end.