With the recent release of the first alpha of PHP 5.3, the community has been talking and testing this new version - here's just a few:

• Johannes Schluter looking at the actual release
• The PHP 10.0 blog mentioning the impact this new release will have on the language and the web
• and a few tests that Lars Strojny has already run on the release.
• Evert Pot's look at some of the upcoming features of PHP 5.3 (including code)
• Some testing from PHP Freaks
• A note about some testing with the Stubbles framework

You can check out this page on the PHP.net wiki for more information on what's left for the final release and a tentative schedule for the releases in between.

In an effort to keep things a bit more secure (after finding out about this) the symfony team has officially released their own security policy to help prevent issues like that in the future.

You may be wondering why it has been taking us such a long time to react. Here's the main reason: we had not a very strong security alert reporting and qualifying process. This has been fixed recently. So as of now, if you find a security bug in symfony, please send an email to security at symfony-project.com, with as much details as you can and ideally a patch if you can provide one.

The wiki has a whole section on how to report security issues to get them to the right place.

As is pointed out both by Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone, there's been another article posted due to the response from the (now infamous) CIO article - "PHP's Enterprise Strengths and Weaknesses, Take 2" (by Zend's John Coggeshall).

So, in the digital toolbox of the developer, where has PHP been designed to work best? And where is it, perhaps, not the best tool for the job? [...] While other languages can surely be used to solve The Web Problem, in this article I explain why PHP is the premier solution for server-side Web scripting.

John talks about how PHP was written for the web, how it approaches and handles web requests, the security of the language and some of the major software packages that are being used in PHP development today (like the Zend Framework, PHPUnit and PECL extensions).

There's been a few posts about the upcoming namespace support in PHP from different bloggers in the community including:

• A post on the Stubbes blog by Frank Kleine and his discoveries of how the "use" keyword needs to be used in your applications
• A follow-up post from Frank as well correcting some of the problems in his first examples
• Some opinions from Richard Heyes on how useful they seem to him
• Brian Moon's comments on the level of traffic that the namespace discussion has been getting on the php.internals mailing list.

Right now there's so many ideas flying around about what namespaces should be and how they should be implemented that it'll be interesting to see which ideas finally come out on top.

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.

On his blog, Bill has posted about a patch for IIS7 running on a Windows Vista machine that corrects an issue with applications that send multiple response headers.

Today we released a patch for IIS7 in Windows Vista that addresses an issue we've seen with CGI applications (especially PHP applications that use the built-in CGI component). The typical symptom is an application that runs using CGI and is unable to support multiple "cookies" for authentication or personalization.

He also links to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on the topic and to the download for the patch.

Gregory Szorc writes today about a fact that's only recently come true in PHP's handling of errors - it seems that it now returns proper HTTP status codes when a problem comes up.

If it encounters a serious error, like a parse error, it just stops and there is nothing you can do about it. If this happens on a hosted web site, you get a blank page served with the HTTP status code of 200. Completely useless to remote connections.

This fix will be included in the next version of PHP - the upcoming 5.2.4 release.

On O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, there's a new tutorial by Deepak Vohra about the creation of web services with PHP, two different kinds - a SOAP service (and client) and an XML-RPC web service.

A web service consists of a server to serve requests to the web service and a client to invoke methods on the web service. The PHP class library provides the SOAP extension to develop SOAP servers and clients and the XML-RPC extension to create XML-RPC servers and clients. Before I delve further into developing web services with PHP, I shall briefly discuss web services.

HE starts with the SOAP service, using the functionality from the php_soap module to create a simple SOAP server (including the creation of a WSDL file, example included). The other side of things is included as well - a SOAP client that makes a request for items from a certain catalog and outputs to a page.

He uses the XML-RPC functionality to make the same type of service (with the same data) and includes the request and response XML for their request for the "hello" message the server responds with.

On the SEO Expert Blog today, there's a new tutorial showing hos to consume the XML provided by the Amazon wish list service with the help of PHP5's SimpleXML functionality.

With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial.

He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.

DevShed continues their tutorial series looking at working with PHP and databases today with more excerpted material from the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP, Second Edition" (by Kevin Tatroe, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Peter MacIntyre).

Picking up from where we left off last week, we'll be discussing shortcuts, query responses, metadata, and more.

They start off looking at shortcuts, those handy things the PEAR DB package offers to make life simpler (like getRow and getAssoc) before moving on to how to get the details about the response itself (like affectedRows and tableInfo). Next up is working with the metadata (using getListOf) and, finally, a sample application to tie them all together.