On his blog, Mike Lively has posted a look at some of the work he's been doing on patches for the late static binding functionality to be included in PHP, including an example of the updates in action.

This weekend I wrapped up a few small tests and sent the patch in and it was subsequently pushed to php 5.3 and php 6.0. Now, this is not at all the way I wanted things to work, in all honesty I think the patch is pretty hokey but unfortunately nobody really spoke up in support of the changes I wanted to make to parent:: in regards to LSB.

His example shows how to override a static method and push that new method's execution to the parent class (in two ways - safe using forward_static_call and the not so safe calling itself with a parent:: override).

Andrei Zmievski has posted an encouraging note on his blog about the progress of PHP6 concerning the number of functions that have been correctly converted to support Unicode.

Well, PHP boys and girls, this feels like quite a milestone: 50% of the 3084 functions that are bundled with PHP 6 have been upgraded to support and work safely with Unicode.

He includes a small chart beside the post as well showing where things are currently at like the safe vs unsafe functions.

A new release of the Zip PECL package has been made according to this post on Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today. The main update in this release is to counteract a Windows bug that's interfering with binary file opens.

The issue is actually a windows bug. No matter if I give or not the "b" flag to fopen, the write operations are not binary safe. It seems to be a known issue as many projects use the same trick.

The problem comes up when PHP forces the binary mode in SAPI and CLI, making the binary writes to a file non-binary safe no matter what. Pierre is also asking for help from anyone out there with any information/bug reports/references about this issue that would yield something useful.

The answer is very simple - watch John.

When John migrates, to me it means two things in particular;

• If there is a performance hit vs. the older PHP version, it will be an acceptable one.
• There are no show-stopping bugs.

It's an interesting standard to set for the adoption of something as beneficial as the move from PHP4 to PHP5, but it is one way to judge the effectiveness. When you see the major applications tailoring their setups for PHP5 environments, it might be time to consider jumping ship yourself...