On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article posted that has a review of PHPStorm, an IDE from JetBrains that focuses on providing a great experience for PHP developers and tons of features.

It's said the tool doesn't make the craft - a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he'll rarely choose anything other than the hammer. [...] I'm talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other.

Bruno Skvorc goes through a brief summary of what the editor is about and talks about some of the more notable features including:

• Being built on Java (good and bad)
• The IDE being strictly project-oriented
• Supports the latest PHP version, including 5.4
• Smart refactoring
• Good intellisense support

He also mentions the plugin architecture that's included with the product and a few of the more handy plugins available. They're also running a giveaway in collaboration with the PHPStorm folks and are giving out IDE licenses and copies of SitePoint's "PHPMaster: Create Cutting Edge Code" book (rules are included in the article).

As Alexey Zakhlestins' mentions on his blog, the PHP-FPM project is now under the BSD license with the potential for it to be included in the main PHP distribution.

PHP-FPM is "deciphered" as "PHP FastCGI Process Manager" and is a patch for php to greatly improve FastCGI SAPI usage in production. It adds a bunch of additional features to php's fastcgi such as: easy php-process daemonization (with ability to specify uid/gid/chroot/log-file), safe php-processes restart (without losing requests), custom error-handling and accelerated file-upload support (requires additional support from web-server).

You can find out more about the project from its main site including a FAQ and documentation to get it up and running.

Time are getting tough out there - a recession is coming around and companies all over are feeling the impact. People are looking for places to save money without having to compromise on functionality and quality. Larger numbers are turning to Open Source communities to provide solutions to fill that gap. Stefan Koopmanschap looks at this trend in his most recent blog post.

As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?

Stefan talks about Enterprise resources and their shift in needs away from the "vanity projects" and more into the day-to-day, stable clients. Open Source is giving them a bit of that "fun" back in and allowing them to do more with less - little to no licensing, no vendor lockdown, etc.

In this new post to his blog, Marcus Borger looks a companies and their relationship to the PHP project - more specifically Zend and their close ties with PHP and its source.

Why can Zend not simply change the license of the Zend Engine to PHP License? Why do we want this? Because it creates issues with using PHP. And we do not even inform people about it, because we are silent about this fact. So is there a reason why this has not happened already long ago?

He points out the two different sides to consider - how they (Zend and their employees) have contributed to the language and its development and what the license says about ownership of the main engine. Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has made a comment on the post about why the licensing is set up how it is and how it relates to the TSRM library.

The PHP.net website has a note posted about the restructuring of the manual

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions.

Changes were made in the function reference and in the predefined variables and context options/parameters sections as well as information on upcoming features like namespaces, late static bindings and Phar (to be included in PHP 5.3). The manual is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

The PHP Women have started up an article competition of all of those aspiring technical authors out there. All you have to do to enter is whip up something for their Best Practices section:

To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding - here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven't thought of.

At the end of July, they'll take their two favorites out of the articles that've been submitted and hand out perpetual licenses for the Zend Studio for Eclipse software to the winners. Remember, you don't have to be female to participate - they're happy to take in content from anyone and everyone. Just sign up and add your topic to the Best Practices forum to submit - it's that easy!

A little while back Matthew Turland posted an interesting item to has blog talking about what he calls the "odd triangle" of PHP, MySQL and Oracle.

In [an article from Maggie Nelson in a blog entry], she remarks on the article being MySQL-oriented and how limited MySQL explain plan support is compared to Oracle. I've had some thoughts in my head for a while that are related to these points, so I finally decided to, knock on wood, put pen to paper.

Matthew talks about things he agrees with (Oracle over MySQL when it comes to hierarchal data and set operators) and some of the things that can make Oracle, with all its power, fall by the wayside. This includes its licensing, the administration costs and some of the recent developments between Sun and MySQL.

A little while back, Alan Knowles wondered something that I'm sure has crosses the mind of every PHP developer out there, especially when they came across a particularly bad chunk of code - some people should need to apply for a license before releasing their PHP code out into the wild.

Unlike most of the reviews you get, I was specifically looking at code quality [of the CMSs]. not fuzzy does it look nice!

He looks at a whole list of them including: Tanslucis, Siteman, Pivot, jaf-cms, Guppy, Doop and CutePHP. Unfortunately, most of the news is bad - between badly structured code and mixes of HTML and PHP, there was almost nothing good in any of them.

If you're headed up to this year's PHP Quebec conference, keep an eye out for Cal Evans and the Zend team. According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, they'll be giving away a free copy of the Zend Studio software.

If you are at PHP Quebec and want a chance to win a copy of Zend Studio, find either myself or John Coggeshall and give us your business card. I'll take them all, put them in a jar I keep just for these occasions and draw one at random and give that person a shiny new license to Zend Studio.

You'll need to still be around to win the big prize and keep an eye on DevZone to see who ends up taking it home.

Nick Halstead has started up another programming competition today - this time it's a bit broader in scope and doesn't focus so much on just PHP.

I have a couple of licenses for Zend Studio Professional that I have been holding back to give away for a competition. So after writing yesterdays programming 'tips' I thought perhaps I should get my readers to submit their own tips and then give away one copy for what I think is the best 'tip' and then I will also hold a online vote for the second copy.

The basic process is to submit your favorite tip to Nick and he'll pick his favorite of the day. This happens each day and at the end of the week, there'll be a drawing for the licenses from each day's top tips.

Submit your entries via his contact form.