There's been some rumors floating around about the possibility of PHP's MySQL support going away in upcoming versions of the language. In his latest post Johannes Schlüter tries to bring a bit of clarity to these rumors and what's actually being removed.

Over the last few days different people asked me for comments about PHP dropping MySQL support. These questions confused me, but meanwhile I figured out where these rumors come from and what they mean. The simple facts are: No, PHP is not dropping MySQL support and we, Oracle's MySQL team, continue working with the PHP community.

He suggests that the confusion might have come from the recent changes to "soft deprecate" the oldest ext/mysql functionality and warn users against using it in their applications. He talks about the history of MySQL support in PHP and one project that removing it could adversely effect (WordPress).

If you've been following along with some of the articles about the compiler Facebook is developing for PHP, you might want to check out these comments from ReadWriteWeb.com (by Mike Melanson) with more from his point of view.

According to our sources, Facebook has been working on a PHP compiler that will increase speed by around 80% and offer a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that will offer a number of advantages. The project is very similar to Google's Unladen Swallow project, which rebuilt the Python compiler, boosting the speed fivefold and opening the door for multi-language integration.

Included are also some comments from Richard Crowley about what Facebook could be releasing, a compiler that would still allow PHP to remain interpreted but provide the speed of being compiled. Some of the comments on the post wonder how something like this compiler compares to an opcode cache and doubts on whether it will end up being open sourced at all.

You can also get another opinion on what will be released in this article from the All Facebook blog. They reinforce that the announcement will come today and how much potential something like this could have to change what PHP could become.

In this new post to his blog today Phil Sturgeon takes on some of the rumors that have been floating around about a version 2.0 of the CodeIgniter framework.

Ever since it was announced that ExpressionEngine 2.0 would be running on CodeIgniter, the forums have been jammed full of "CodeIgniter 2.0" questions. I have answer this so many times I wanted to clear things up. [...] I figured, instead of just ranting about it, I could use this oppertunity to discuss what is, what is not and what should be going into CodeIgniter over the next few versions.

He breaks up things into four categories - confirmed features, missing features, minor syntax changes and a "crazy but helpful" section.

In an effort to dispel some of the rumors and myths around the CakePHP framework (as presented most recently by a different blogger) Chris Hartjes has made a new "mythbuster" post to his blog today with a rebuttal to the points from the other article.

I ran across an article comparing CakePHP and Symfony and found that the writer had a number of preconceived ideas about CakePHP. These same ideas keep popping up everywhere, used by people looking to get their hate on about CakePHP. I sent a very well-reasoned email to the writer clearing up some of those misconceptions [...] So, in the interest of clarifying things about CakePHP I thought I would share that email, slightly rewritten for this blog posting, but the content is roughly the same.

The post/email covers a few different topics some might have misconceptions about concerning the framework:

• Lack of Documentation
• Scaffolding
• Models are tied to controllers in a 1:1 relationship
• Cake's Ajax and Javascript helpers do not support graceful degradation
• Cake's HTML and Form helpers produces bad markup
• Unit tests are an afterthought
• CakePHP is not an "enterprise capable framework"

As mentioned by Ivo Jansch, Andi Gutmans (of Zend) responded to the recent speculation about a buyout of the company in his keynote address at this year's php|tek conference:

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

Richard Davey has brought his PHP-centered comic, "PHP Life", back to life with this new strip about the Zend/Oracle rumors.

After a short break the PHP Life team are back. In this strip we look at the Zend/Oracle deal. If Oracle do buy-out Zend then let's hope things fare better for the Zend staff than Oracle staff at the moment!

You can see it here (on his blog), or on the PHP Life site...

Richard Davey has brought his PHP-centered comic, "PHP Life", back to life with this new strip about the Zend/Oracle rumors.

After a short break the PHP Life team are back. In this strip we look at the Zend/Oracle deal. If Oracle do buy-out Zend then let's hope things fare better for the Zend staff than Oracle staff at the moment!

You can see it here (on his blog), or on the PHP Life site...

Christian Wenz has posted this new item on his blog today with a report relating to the Oracle/Zend rumors that have been floating around.

Well, the rumors (that also made it into blogosphere, including Toby's post) obviously could not be ignored by Zend any longer. Therefore, the German division of Zend just sent out an email to a couple of people officially stating that Zend is currently not negotiating a sale to Oracle.

I suppose only time will tell on the deal, but it seems for now that the sale is not going to happen (and that there never was a sale in talks at all).

Christian Wenz has posted this new item on his blog today with a report relating to the Oracle/Zend rumors that have been floating around.

Well, the rumors (that also made it into blogosphere, including Toby's post) obviously could not be ignored by Zend any longer. Therefore, the German division of Zend just sent out an email to a couple of people officially stating that Zend is currently not negotiating a sale to Oracle.

I suppose only time will tell on the deal, but it seems for now that the sale is not going to happen (and that there never was a sale in talks at all).