Brian Swan has posted a new timeline to his MSDN blog today about the road that Microsoft has traveled with PHP to get to where they are today.

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By "lately", I mean in the last few years.) And, I've been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft's efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I'd share a bit of that summary here

The timeline runs from back in 2006 when PHP and Windows/IIS/SQL Server just wasn't much of an option through the FastCGI and SQL Server driver years and finally rounding out with WinCache, PHP 5.3 improvements for Windows and the Azure SDK for PHP.

On NETTUTS.com a tutorial has been posted recently showing you how to build a widget for Buzz, the Google's service similar to Twitter. If you've ever worked with the Twitter timeline concept, using Buzz will feel very familiar. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, it's a read-only kind of thing.

At the moment, there's no API to work with the Buzz service; Google is expected to provide one within the next several months, however, for now, the public updates are available as Atom feeds.

They grab these Atom feeds via a proxy PHP script (can't cross-domain with Ajax, after all) and then some Ajax to real the latest from this proxy. The results are displayed in a (very familiar looking) timeline with the help of the included HTML and CSS/images. The last part of the process is to push it into a jQuery plugin for easier use down the line. You can get the source download here and check out a demo online.

On the Tutorialzine site there's a recent post looking at the creation of an advanced timeline that combines jQuery, PHP and CSS similar to the one Google has.

Today we are making an Advanced Event Timeline with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS & jQuery, that will display a pretty time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

The tutorial includes the XHTML to create the items on the page (like the slider container and the bar), the PHP to get the data from the database and dynamically add the elements for each event, the jQuery code to make the fun slider work and the CSS to style everything.

Brandon Savage has written up some thoughts on what can be a somewhat painful part of software development - creating the specification and schedule for the development of the application.

In the time that I have developed software, I don't know that I've ever met a developer who got excited about writing specs for anything. In fact, most developers loathe writing specs, or developing schedules of any kind. [...] Businesses need schedules to know when products will be finished and schedule things like trade shows, product launches, and write contracts with clients who need or want a particular product.

He has a few recommendations for things that could make the process a little easier including the fact that specs should not be considered documentation, that the developers should be the ones creating them and that scheduling out the development time line isn't all about the actual development.

A few days back Thomas Koch posted a timeline he worked up of the release of several popular PHP quality assurance tools:

Since I'm not a contributor to any QA tool I'll center around the user perspective and the process of establishing these tools in a small to middle web company like YMC. As an outline for the first part I thought to give an historical view on QA in PHP and therefor made a timeline of PHP QA milestones.

He includes both an image of the timeline and the dates as text for the releases of things like PHPUnit, eZ Components, Zend Framework, PHP_Depend and PHPUnderControl.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a new article that looks at some best practices when it comes to estimating the time you can tell the customer a "more correct" timeline for when things will be ready.

Our estimating team spent two months thinking and discussing how software companies create estimates; we discussed what works and what doesn't. While the final document itself, along with the accompanying workbook, are available internally only, some of what was learned about the meta process of estimating may be interesting to others. Here are four Best Practices that came out of the process that we want to share with everyone.

He looks at "rightsizing" your estimations to fit the project, using only qualified people and constantly monitor your estimates and those doing the estimates (to ensure things are progressing as they should).

The estimate is what it is; if the amount is too high for the customer to accept then the price per hour can be adjusted or the feature set can be reduced. The number of hours that the project will take, however, should never be arbitrarily adjusted simply to meet a client's budget.

Richard Heyes has pointed out an interesting little app that Lucas Baltes created to visually show the timeline of PHP releases from now back.

The timeline stretches all the way from the current PHP 5 release (bye bye PHP 4) back to some of the initial releases Rasmus made as the "PHP Tools version 1.0" back in 1995. Each entry is timestamped with when it was released and some of the more recent ones have "tails" showing how long their life lasted.

Lucas also links to the museum on the PHP.net website where all of these versions can be downloaded.

Philip Olson has posted a brief history of one of the more infamous features of PHP on its fifth birthday - register_globals:

It's been a long road and exactly five years (35 releases) since the much discussed and highly controversial PHP directive register_globals has been disabled by default in PHP. After sifting through the mailing list archives, the following set of information has been compiled. Feel free to make additions, corrections, and report register_globals memories!

His list includes some recent "tidbits" about the directive (including the fact that there's still lots of code in the PHP CVS repository that requires register_globals to be on). Following that, there's his brief timeline of the directive's progression - from its infancy as gpc_globals all the way up to more recent events - like its removal from the PHP 6 HEAD CVS versions. With the release of this next major version of PHP, "the beast" can finally be laid to rest.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new article about the latest offering when it comes to the Framework - the introduction of a bug tracker/source browser application on the Framework's site to help manage the project.

The post also includes some screenshots from the application, showcasing each of its many pages of functionality - source browser, issue tracker, timeline, and the search function.

For direct access to the site, head over to the Zend Framework site and click on the Developer tab.

Greg Beaver, frustrated with the bug tracker offerings out there, has taken the pearweb bug tracking system and modified it for use on his main project - the Chiara_PEAR_Server - as a bugtracker/timeline system.

You can grab a download of this project directly from the PEAR website and follow Greg's six simple steps to get it up and running.