Paul Jones has released two new concurrent versions of the Solar framework today:

Yesterday, I released Solar 0.27.0, then quick-fixed two minor bugs and released 0.27.1 an hour later. It feels so good to be back doing releases on a monthly basis.

Some of the updates/changes in these new releases include:

• The use of spl_autolaod to load classes
• Locale functions have a new home
• a super-fast JSON encoder/decoder
• a modification to the SQL adapter for PDO
• A new bit of functionality in Solar_Url that can find the ".ext" filename extension in a URL automagically

The Zend Developer Zone has taken a look at the first release of the Zend_Locale_UTF8 component for the Zend Framework and some comments from it's lead developer, Andre Hoffmann.

Andre Hoffmann posted a blog entry today to talk about his work on Zend_Locale_UTF8: "I just released the first version of Zend_Locale_UTF8.It doesn't come with all functions nor with the best performance, but it shows how the current state of development is."

He also lists some of the things still missing from the component, including: unit tests, substr, strstr, PHP6 support, and mbstring support.

Following up on some of his previous posts to the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks has posted this quick guide with some "hot UTF-8 tips" to share with the community.

As a result of all the noise about UTF-8, got an email from Marek Gayer with some very smart tips on handling UTF-8. What follows is a discussion illustrating what happens when you get obsessed with performance and optimizations (be warned - may be boring, depending on your perspective).

He talks mainly about using the native PHP functionality to avoid the mbstring issues that could arise by restricting locale behavior and using a fast case conversion function to handle strings correctly. The other tip involves delivery methods to those not able to recieve UTF-8 formatted content - checking their character set and responding accordingly.