On the AppDynamics blog there's a post from Omed Habib where he looks at the current state of security in the PHP language and makes predictions about the future of it in PHP and where the language might be heading.

In some ways security is an infinite game of chess on a board the size of the world. For every move you make, the hackers have a countermove ready. They are highly motivated to take what you have, so the game never ends; it just switches players once in awhile. In this final blog in the series, we are going to review the game board, with a look at the most recent changes to security in PHP 7 and earlier supported versions. Then, we’ll try to look a few moves ahead with predictions for the future of PHP security.

In the article he talks about PHP's popularity and how it has somewhat worked against it and its reputation when it comes to secure development. He covers PHP 7 and some of the security-related updates that came with it including:

• whitelisting classes on unserialize
• the cryptographically secure random number generator
• patches for buffer overflows and memory leaks

He ends the post looking at a possible future of the language based on comments made in this other article., suggesting that one possible place for the language to head is into the IoT (Internet of Things) space and interacting with the devices on the other end.

On the Inviqa Tech Blog Ben Longden has posted a Year in Review of PHP and the community, including some of the major trends that came into their own last year (2012).

Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a year in review post (from Ben Longden, Rowan Merewood and Alistair Stead) looking back at 2011 and everything that happened in the world of PHP.

2011 has flown by in a blur as we have been busy helping many new clients with large scale PHP projects - proof that PHP continues to gain traction with enterprise. [...] The ongoing financial climate only adds pressure for IT managers to cut costs and deliver more value from their existing infrastructure and therefore require enterprises to re-consider any prior aversion to open source and PHP. This is allowing our industry to consistently buck the trend of the markets and expand to support the increased demand.

They list some of the changes in PHP itself, like the Release Candidates for PHP 5.4 and the 5.3 requirements of some frameworks, as well as some community-related changes: Facebook's Virtual PHP Machine (hhvm) and the number of PHP-related events in Europe and the UK. They mention some projects that become more prominent in 2011 including BDD testing, Platform as a Service products and the EBay acquisition of Magento.

Also included in the post are a few predictions for 2012 including a possible merging of frameworks along similar strategies, the increased use of dependency injection containers and a serious look into caching in PHP applications.