As is mentioned in this new post to the Symfony blog, the latest milestone release of the popular framework has been made - Symfony 2.3.0.

We were all waiting for it and many of us have been working hard for the last four years to make it happen. Today, Symfony 2.3.0 is available and this is the first long-term support release for Symfony version 2. I'm so happy that we were able to achieve this important milestone in the life of the framework. THANK YOU for making it possible. [...] That gives us the best of two different worlds: small teams and agile companies can benefit from the latest features by upgrading every six months (they have two months to upgrade); large teams and traditional companies can standardize on a release. [...] And 2.3.0 is our first long term support release. We, the community, are going to maintain it for the next three years (until May 2016).

The post includes some statistics about this latest release as well as some of the new features that come along with it. For those that want to upgrade right away, there's also some instructions on what to change in your "composer.json" file to try it all out.

On the PHPBuilder.com site today there's a new tutorial posted from Octavia Anghel about creating a login for your site that's powered by Ajax and uses a bit more security than normal. It includes hooks to use the Ajax Server Secure Layer or an OpenSSL connection.

In this article you will learn how to write a login application in PHP using Ajax and SSL/TLS in two ways either using aSSL (Ajax Server Secure Layer), a library that implements a technology similar to SSL without HTTPS or a simple Ajax and OpenSSL, an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols.

They start with the aSSL method and link you to a download of the tool as well as some sample code to help you get started passing data to it via the session. The second example shows the OpenSSL method, mostly consisting of checking on the server side of the certificate that's passed along with the request.