In a new blog post, Chris Hartjes asks what's the next stack coming up on the horizon. LAMP has been the king for so long now it's hard to think about what might be next, but he takes a stab at it:

So the next thing I've been wondering about is about what future PHP stacks will look like, at least on the open source side of things. Have we gotten to the point where this is as good as it gets?

He looks at other stacks he's been working with (like LNNP - Linux, nginx, Postgres and PHP) as well as the question of limitations. Are we limiting ourselves by relying on LAMP too much? What else is out there? Does Javascript have a permenant place in any of this? (jLAMP anyone?)

ITJungle.com has posted another article in their series looking at PHP on IBM's i5/OS platform that's already included an overview of System i and a very basic look at PHP's structure.

This article provides an overview of the API toolkit, and a collection of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate PHP programs accessing and working with i5/OS objects.

The article comes complete with diagrams of the stacks for both LAMP and iADP as well as an overview of the Zend Core API and a code example of how to make a connection to the backend and send off a message (SNDMSG) to the local system.

Bothered by the ugly way Xdebug stack traces were turing out, Derick Rethans has created a script to fix that.

I've always been annoyed by the way how Xdebug's stack traces looked liked. So I spend some time on making them look better. I will show the differences according to the following script.

The simple script takes the output and adds a bit of formatting, stripping down the information to make it a bit more clear. Check out the before and after shots to see the difference.

Alison Holloway has announced that there's a new version of the Zend Core for Oracle out on the streets and can be downloaded here.

Zend have just released a new version of Zend Core for Oracle, the prebuilt stack of Oracle Instant Client, Apache and PHP. It's version 1.5 and now has an optional installation of Apache 2.0.59. It used to automatically install Apache 2 whether you wanted it or not, but now you can use an existing web server, either Apache, IIS, or Oracle's HTTP Server.

It's now using PHP 5.1.6, the latest OCI8 extension (Oracle's PHP driver), and Oracle Instant Client. This stack has a native installer, and it's available on Linux, AIX, Solaris and Windows.

You can get complete details on the package from this page on the Zend webstite including highlights and the system requirements to get it up and running.

On dikini.net today, there's a new post that talks about a method of implementing saved state in PHP, and how to couple it with closures.

In a previous short post I describe a way to emulate closures in php. Using that technique execution environment, otherwise known as a call stack can be saved for future use. This can be put to good use. A couple of patterns or programming techniques could be useful in practice.

A closure represents a state => implemenation of a state pattern. This is a bit rich. Usually in OO programming the state pattern is implemented by encapsulating different protocols, for denoted states. This is simple to implement by substituting your protocol specification with a different name.

His example starts off with the Drupal hooks, using the State pattern to create a method of tracking "where we are" via PHP.