Max Horvath has called for some help in getting a feature included (and fully working) into the next release of the Eclipse PDT extension - phar support.

With Eclipse PDT 2.0 to be released in September (or October) support for namespaces is already on the roadmap. Support for Phar archives has not been listed, yet. But in my opinion Eclipse PDT 2.0 must support handling Phar archives when PHP 5.3 will hit the street.

He points out some of the current lackings that the Eclipse extension has including the inability to browse phar archives and that there is no way to debug the archives. He's opened a feature request for the functonality to be added and suggested fleshing it out on the wiki.

This is where you come in - he wants to know what sort of support that developers out there would like for phar in this next release. Just leave comments on his blog with your ideas.

The PHP::Impact blog has pointed out that the Zend Framework has gotten even closer to having a true method for dependency injection in its applications - a proposal issued for Zend_Container.

Bradley Holt has announced the creation of a new proposal Zend_Container, a simplified version of Zend_Di. According to him, if the framework is going to have a dependency injection component this component needs to be as simple as possible, something along the lines of PicoContainer.

The proposal seeks to replace the use of class-managed singletons and Zend_Registry, scope access to containers and use reflection to determine dependencies for items inside. The component has been given the go-ahead from the ZF team and development is already in process.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial (from Aldemar Bernal) about some of the basic use of the Zend_Acl component of the Zend Framework.

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

He talks about the proposal that's out for a potential update to the component, the two key points being the front controller plugin and a new action helper. He includes some sample code showing how to set it all up including a "denied" controller to handle the failures.

David Coallier is looking for a few good men (women, children, pets who can code, etc) to join up with the PHP development group for this year's Google Summer of Code to help with the various ideas they've come up with.

Hello everyone, as mentioned a few weeks ago the most awaited Google Summer of Code is back again this year. This being said, once again the PHP Project has been accepted and we have started posting our list of ideas (http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008).

Some of the projects proposed include:

• PECL, website improvements and Windows Build Support
• Automatic Code Checker
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6
• Build Infrastructure and macro bindings for writing extension in D
• Rewrite the run-tests.php script
• PhD: The PHP based Docbook renderer

Be sure to check out the full list and see where you might want to get involved!

Piggybacking on a recent proposal for traits in PHP, Lukas Smith has suggested something that could help make the organization of these sorts of contributions (and their "staying power") a bit more likely to happen - an official PHP.net wiki of sorts.

As such I really like what Stefan has done with his Traits proposal. Very nicely done. [...] Right now the RFC documents are hidden away in the unwieldy mailinglist archive and Stefan's private homepage, which could disappear any day. Of course there are also the various web archives, but what would be nice to have is a PHP.net wiki.

He notes that not only would this help protect information like this from dropping off the face of the web but it might also pave the way for some other changes to be made to the language (and to provide a space where everyone can share their ideas). He specifically mentions his wants for an array_merge_replace and a change to file_exists.

On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine has pointed out a proposal from Stefan Marr to include functionality for traits in PHP.

As a language construct within PHP it would be very easy to do the same, but easier to learn and to use. Beside some keyword issues (the RFC uses "use" as keyword, but this will of course conflict with namespaces) I'm wondering what this will have an impact on reflection - the RFC stays unclear about this.

A trait is a free-floating chink of functionality that, instead of being confined to a class (or file) that has to be called on to use it, exists where the developer can use it from anywhere at any time. This helps solve some of the issues with single inheritance in PHP.

Padraic Brady has officially proposed a new component for the Zend Framework - one to handle the various microformat methods that have been gaining in popularity.

I've proposed Zend_Microformat on the ZF Proposal Wiki at Zend_Microformat - Padraic Brady. I've also started a proposal page for Zend_Microformat_Xfn.

He briefly explains what they are ("a collection of data encodings") and an example of their use (like the XHTML Friends Network to link social network users). You can find out more about them here.

In filtering through the mass of projects that he's collected around him, Padraic Brady has decided to cut one loose - the Zend Framework package he'd been developing to introduce YAML parsing and functionality to the framework.

I've been going through all those open source projects and cutting the dead weight. [...] One of the victims of this review has been Zend_Yaml. Earlier this morning I found an odd comment on the Zend_Translate_Yaml proposal by Thomas Weidner that he was erasing his proposal on the basis that there had been no progress on Zend_Yaml.

He's removed the proposal from the Zend Framework proposal pages after receiving an email noting that the package would not comply fully to the YAML 1.1 specification and couldn't be included. With the introduction of the Syck extension into PECL, it could support it but Padraic opted to just tell the ZF group about this functionality rather than working on the build himself.

Matthew Turland has been working on a new project as a part of the Zend Framework - a wrapper around the Remember the Milk website API.

RTM is basically a TODO list on serious steroids. It's the Swiss Army Knife of task management. It allows you to manage multiple lists of tasks. You can add them easily from a variety of mediums, tag them, prioritize them, set deadlines for them, have them repeat, get reminders for them, tie them to physical real world location, and share them.

He's even already issued a proposal for the functionality to the project to hep further along its inclusion. His goal is to get it included in the core for the framework within the next two releases.

Since it's been moved up into the "Final Draft" stage in its proposal process, Padraic Brady wanted to blog about this latest update for the OAuth Specification, a standardized protocol that allows secure API authentication from both desktop and web applications.

Because I love all things OpenID related and am an OpenID "pusher" in Europe (blame the OpenID Europe Foundation membership on Snorri Giorgetti), I'll be proposing a PHP5 implementation of OAuth to the Zend Framework (assuming no other OAuth proposal) and PEAR (PEAR because that's now the home of my OpenID For PHP library under proposal).

You can get more information about OAuth from the project's website.