On the Zend Developer Zone today the first part of a series from Vikram Vaswani has been posted. This new set of articles will look at how to use the Stack Exchange API from your PHP applications.

The thing about Stack Overflow, though, is that it has a geeky secret of its own. Like many Web 2.0 applications, it exposes its data to the public via the Stack Exchange Web service API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This API allows access to a number of important functions, including searching for questions, retrieving answers and comments, accessing user profiles, and working with tags and badges. It's also pretty easy to integrate this API into a PHP application - and this two-part article will show you how!

In part one he introduces you to some of the conventions and tips you'll need to know when reading through the article. He shows how to get and parse a sample response (with json_decode). He also uses the proposed StackPHP PEAR package to make requests for general question information, specific details, tags, comments and search results.

Stas Malyshev has a new post to his blog points out the post he made over on StackExchange asking developers what features they'd like to see in upcoming versions of PHP (with over 70 people responding).

Corollary of that is that some clever tricks are better left not done and some cool things may not look that cool when you have to deal with the consequences. That being said, I think there are many cool things yet to be done in PHP. So, I’ve posted a poll on Programmers.StackExchange site about what people want to see in PHP. I know people regularly post on PHP lists about that, etc. but I think SE crowd would be somewhat different from what is found on PHP internal lists, so it would be interesting to see what people’s wishlists for PHP are.

Among the suggestions on the list there's things like: named parameters, an effort to make PHP more truly OOP, better Unicode support - even a working parser someone created to address some of the common concerns about the language. It's good to see some commentors coming back at some of the suggestions with their own opinions too.