Padraic Brady recently made a post about the some of the "deception" that various publishing companies (he specifically mentions Wrox) have made when it comes to publishing books on PHP6. In his latest post he shares a response Wrox made to some of his comments.

In "The Art Of Deception Or Publishing PHP6 Books" I aired my unflattering opinions about publishers who have been selling "PHP 6" books. PHP 6, last I checked, was a bit like Leprechauns. [...] It's certainly not complete and stable, and its future feature list remains a bit flexible. You could see PHP 5.4 in 2011 before PHP 6 is finished...guessing here. As its developers would say - it'll be ready when it's ready. One day. Maybe.

He shares their response to his comments by looking at easy of the books covering PHP6 and two things they're doing to help the situation - pulling the Beginner book and a call for those wanting to make the books better to get involved.

Padraic Brady has posted about the art of deception that several publishers have involved themselves in - already publishing books about PHP6.

I was strolling around a bookstore today, Easons on O'Connell Street here in Dublin, when I found myself staring at a bookshelf in near shock. Kid, I thought, you've been out of the loop for only two months and somehow those crazy people have managed to release PHP 6 right under your nose! [...] The more I stared at the three youthful faces grinning at me from the cover, the more I convinced myself this was a publishing error. No way was PHP6 going to be released without me noticing. Google Reader would have been on fire with that news. So what the hell was I looking at? I was apparently looking at a big fat lie.

He goes on to talk about PHP6 (aka the "long standing grail" of PHP) and how publishers, apparently misinformed as to the release date of the version, preempted its release and assumed that it would be out as soon as or before the book was. Obviously this was the wrong choice and now they're paying for it with the egg on their face.

Sure these PHP6 books have a lot of the PHP 5.3 features mentioned in them, but they're mashed up with other features that won't be ready until PHP6 actually arrives. Oddly enough, upon looking at the contents of most of the books, Padraic discovered something interesting - their content is less about PHP6 and more about the PHP 5.2 series that was current. Seems they're only really PHP6 in name.

Tibo Beijen takes his own look at some of what PHP6 will have to offer and talks a bit about how it would have helped him in a current project:

I'm currently working on [a project] where I've been experimenting with 'domain objects' having 'scalar' or 'value' objects as properties (more on that later).

The talks specifically about two of the upcoming features - type hinting and the __cast magic method that allows you to correctly cast a variable into a different type. He illustrates with some code that handles and manipulates user data and handles exceptions on an incorrect type cast.

For those looking forward to PHP6 (a jump beyond the upcoming PHP 5.3) Fabien Potencier has pointed out a few things that will be coming out in this future release (based on these notes).

PHP 5.3 is just around the corner with a lot of great new features. However, even if I'm really excited about this new release, I won't make yet another PHP 5.3 feature list; I will rather look at the future of PHP. PHP core developers met at php|tek and discussed the future of PHP. And it is really great to see that they plan lots of wonderful features; let's set aside the Unicode stuff.

His list of things he's looking forward to include __cast, ArrayObject/ArrayAccess' wider acceptance, traits, C#-style properties and more.

This new post to the PHPClasses.org blog take a look at some of the new features that will be included in the PHP 5.3 release (coming soon to a web server near you!) by way of an interview with Lukas Smith.

his article presents an interview with core PHP developer Lukas Kahwe Smith that has pushed many of the new features of PHP 5.3 as release manager. Lukas talks about PHP 5.3 new features such as lambda functions, closures and PHAR support. He also explains what are traits, which for now it is a feature that was left out of PHP 5.3. He also talks about future PHP 5.x and PHP 6, as well how anybody can help in the development of PHP to make it come out faster.

They talk about the PHP.net wiki, briefly touch on the PHP 5.3 feature updates, performance/memory usage in the new version, Lambda functions, closures and PHAR and what's to come with PHP 6.

Frederic Marnad has linked to a few other articles about PHP-GTK from the PHP-GTK Community blog today:

• A guide to building out PHP-GTK with the pre-release version of PHP6
• A new introduction to PHP-GTK (with example code)
• An article on DeveloperTutorials.com on building desktop PHP applications

You can find more great PHP-GTK related content and links to tutorials and other sites on the PHP-GTK Community site's main page.

One of the things that's been hanging around PHP's neck since its early days is the magic_quotes setting that was introduces to try to make things easier. In this interesting post Arpad Ray takes a look at this setting and why its a bad thing for PHP to have around.

Like register_globals, it helped lower the barrier of entry to building a dynamic website by removing some of the complexity. However it certainly wasn't without sacrifice, problems with the implementation quickly appeared and continued to abound for the next ten years. Finally in PHP 5.2.2 we got an implementation which (as far as its intentions went) seemed to be bug free, but of course by then it was turned off by default and was already slated to be dropped in PHP 6.

He looks at a few reasons they're bad (not good enough for escaping, inconsistent, performance issues) and some methods - code snippets - on how to deal with it being turned on on your server.

With the release of another DLL driver for PHP on Windows to access Oracle databases, Chris Jones wanted to alleviate any confusion there might be between the two in a new blog post.

As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive versions of the OCI8 extension DLL [...] The two DLLs have the same user script API that do the same thing. You only need to (and only can) enable one at any one time. Choose the one that matches your Oracle client libraries.

The two DLLs - php_oci8.dll and php_oci8_11h.dll - have pretty self-explanitory names, but it could be confusing as to whether you need both or not if you go the 11g route.

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Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.