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.

The Developer Drive site has posted their top 40+ list of libraries and tools that can help developers write better PHP. Their selections range from templating libraries to request handling and even testing tools.

There are scads of PHP tools available over the internet for php developers, but finding an appropriate PHP tool is quite an arduous task and demands effort and time. Today we’ve collected 45 handy PHP development tools for developers.

Included in their list are tools such as:

• Parsedown
• Twig
• Belt
• DebugBar
• Sylius
• XAMPP
• PHP Mess Detector

Several of the libraries can be installed via Composer (another tool in their list) but other items are stand-alone software that would need to be set up outside of the application.

Fabien Potencier has a new post to the Symfony blog today - an announcement about the setup of a PEAR channel to make it easier to grab the various Symfony components individually.

One of the strengths of Symfony2 lies in its components; they define the building blocks of the framework and they can be used as standalone libraries. [...] The Symfony2 components have been available on Git for quite some time now, and as of today, I'm really excited to announce that they are also installable via the brand new Symfony2 PEAR channel, powered by Pirum of course.

Packages included in the list installable on the PEAR channel include:

• BrowserKit
• DependencyInjection
• HttpKernel
• Serializer
• Validator

Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:

The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.

Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.

He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").

Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:

The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.

Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.

He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").

Davey Shafik has posted another update on his web services component he's working up for the Zend Framework, the Zend_Service_Server.

I have been working closely with Matthew Weier O'Phinney for the last week on bringing my Zend_Service_Server proposal to fruition.

There have been several changes, but the core has not moved too far. Matthew, Andi and I have decided that we will first implement the different server/client libraries.

He lists the libraries they'll need to tackle first and talks about an "exercise" he did to work up a JSON server component that works in a similar fashion.

Davey Shafik has posted another update on his web services component he's working up for the Zend Framework, the Zend_Service_Server.

I have been working closely with Matthew Weier O'Phinney for the last week on bringing my Zend_Service_Server proposal to fruition.

There have been several changes, but the core has not moved too far. Matthew, Andi and I have decided that we will first implement the different server/client libraries.

He lists the libraries they'll need to tackle first and talks about an "exercise" he did to work up a JSON server component that works in a similar fashion.

Edin Kadribasic has posted the latest release of his helpful little patch for anyone needing the client libraries for MySQL on Windows - the version for PHP 4.4.3 and MySQL 5.0.22 libraries.

After the final release of PHP 4.4.3 here are the Windows binaries who need PHP compiled against newer version of MySQL libs.

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4.3 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

You can download the file directly from here.

Edin Kadribasic has posted the latest release of his helpful little patch for anyone needing the client libraries for MySQL on Windows - the version for PHP 4.4.3 and MySQL 5.0.22 libraries.

After the final release of PHP 4.4.3 here are the Windows binaries who need PHP compiled against newer version of MySQL libs.

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4.3 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

You can download the file directly from here.

If you're caught using PHP4 on Windows and have been seeing some issues with the older MySQL libraries you've been using lately, it might be time to upgrade. "But I can't move away from PHP4," you say. No worries - this new post from Edin Kadribaaic should have the answer you're looking for.

Since the main PHP 4 distribution cannot be updated with the latest MySQL libs for various reasons, I will provide downloads of the latest PHP 4 with the latest MySQL libs.

His archive contains two files, both DLLs to replace the MySQL libraries that already exist.