On the Internet Super Hero blog, they take a quick look at what's new in the MySQL native driver version that will be included in the upcoming PHP version, PHP 5.3.

PDO_MYSQLND is in the PHP CVS repository at php.net: PDO_MYSQL has been patched (PHP 5.3, PHP 6.0). Try out PDO_MYSQL with the MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd). Its has new features.

They do a short recap of what the native driver libraries are all about and some of the advantages to using them. They look at some of the "memory tricks" supported by the driver and a look at the prepared statement and procedure support.

The Internet Super Hero blog has posted about a preview release of the PDO_MYSQLND and a connector for MySQL to Open Office that have both been announced at this year's MySQL Conference.

The post explains what each of the technologies are for and where they fit in most development. The PDO_MYSQLND functionality is a direct connection for the PDO libraries to connect to MySQL using the native driver.

PDO_MYSQLND inherits all benefits of the MySQL native driver for PHP. In addition to the shared advantages you get the first PDO driver for MySQL developed by Sun/MySQL!

On the PHP Web Services blog today, Sami asks "what's missing from PHP's SOAP extension" that needs to be added or corrected.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.

DevShed has continued their series looking at using the Yahoo! web services with PHP5 in part two - their look at returning the results of a query in serialized arrays.

I'll show you how to parse the results returned by a determined web search service using a few array PHP processing functions. [...] Let's learn how to fetch results returned by the different Yahoo! Search Web Services in the form of serialized PHP arrays

You'll probably want to check out part one of the series before forging on to this second installment - there's a lot of good introductory information in there. With all of that information ingested, you'll have no problem following along with this next part.

They show how to get the results back from a search in an XML format and how, with the simple addition of an optional "output" parameter, can get the same information back in something PHP can natively use (the arrays).

On the Internet Super Hero blog, there's this new post giving examples of compiling the MySQL native driver (mysqlnd) with different versions of PHP - 5.2, 5.3 and 6.0.

A user comment made clear that we need to send out a quick status update on how to install / compile mysqlnd with PHP 5.2, 5.3 and 6.0 .

The instructions are only slightly different for each of the version, mainly in the version that's checked out from CVS. The PHP 5.2.x part, however, suggests that you go ahead and make the move to/wait for PHP 5.3 to use the extension. It's still in beta and (probably) won't be included in any of the 5.2.x branches.

On the PHP Addiction blog today, there's a new post where Doug Hill asks a question of his fellow developers - are there advantages to having a standard container library for PHP?

Most compiled languages that I have used have some kind of container implementation, Lists, Maps, Trees, Stacks and all their many variations. PHP has arrays and the SPL.

The only problem he's noted so far is that containers made in userland would be slower than ones created natively. A comment from Antony Dovgal points out a project similar to what he's looking for that's already in the works.

Gergely Hodicska continues his series on what's coming up in the next major PHP release with a new post covering the new mysql native driver (mysqlnd) that'll be included.

In the first two parts of this series I wrote about namaspaces and late static binding. In this part I will cover mysqlnd (MySQL native driver for PHP), which is also a really cool feature of PHP 5.3. This a replacement library (not an extension) for libmysql (MySQL Client Library) offering a lot of advantage over it.

He includes some of the reasoning why its a better choice, how it's integrated with the Zend Engine, the memory savings that it will give you and some of the functionality included with it like persistent connections, client-side query caching and statistical data collection functions.

Those in the New York area might want to check out a new post Daniel Krook has concerning his talk he'll be giving on native XML databases at next week's New York PHP User Group meeting.

The presentation follows a mailing list thread and resulting blog post that generated a lot of interest and discussion on the topic. It should be a great talk for database administrators, application developers and content producers alike.

According to the summary of the talk, he'll be discussing what XML databases are good for and why you might choose them over a normal database. For more information on attending, check out the NYPHP User Group website.

The Internet Super Hero blog has two happy announcements posted today - the new mysqlnd driver has officially been committed to the branch for the next major PHP release - PHP 5.3 and their renewed support for PDO.

First, we are proud to announce that one year after the announcement to develop a new MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd), the new driver has been committed into the 5.3 branch of the PHP project.

The second news is that we will strengthen our commitment into PHP by improving our support for PHP Data Objects (PDO). We will work on a PDO/mysqlnd driver, both for PHP 5.3 and PHP 6.0. Development starts in these days and will include QA, testing and documentation as we go forward.

For those not familiar with the driver, they also have a brief overview of what it is and what it does differently than the normal MySQL driver as well as a look at which driver they consider the best for which PHP version.

The Internet Super Hero blog happily notes that the PHP community thinks that "mysqlnd is awesome" and was one of the most desired features to be included in PHP 5.3.

Thanks everybody for your trust in mysqlnd and your support! We shall try not to disappoint you in the future and continue with the development. Of course, as the core feature mature more and more, we will try to spend time on implementing new, useful tricks and try to provide you with additional documentation, if time permits.

They also include a link to a forum entry from Jurgen Krieger who ran some tests via XDebug and determined that connection times dropped, query times dropped and there was less memory consumption overall gaining an average boost of 1000ms from a page.