In a new post to her blog Zoe Slattery points out a big step in PHP's presence in systems all around the world - the inclusion of it into the CISC systems.

You probably don't realise it but it's very likely that sometime during the last week you will have have used IBM's CICS technology. [...] Last week PHP made it into CICS, PHP is now being used to build agile front ends and RESTful interfaces for the technology that underpins most of the world's large scale commercial systems. You don't get much more into The Enterprise than that!

IBM made the announcement back on Friday the 12th about the upgrade to the sMash WebSphere software. The update, a SupportPac lets developers run PHP inside of a CICS transaction and can be used to create REST services other applications/interfaces can use to directly communicate with the CICS system.

Shaun Oleson has posted his method (a chunk of code to do it) to connect to the Authorize.NET servers and make a request:

So I've had quite a bit of experience with authorize.NET and PHP and I've found it's difficult to find resources that provide textual examples for integrating the payment processor. I've put together a generic tutorial from documentation that is public. Of course, you will have to specify your Transaction ID and API Login ID. So here you are. If you need assistance or have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

His example is a large get_auth() function that takes in the credit card information (including billing address) and makes a cURL connection to their servers for the request.

Christopher Jones talkes about some updates that he's made to the default PDO functionality of PHP, adding in a few things like pre-fetching and methods to get the details of the database server you're using.

After PHP 5.2.4 shipped and a new release cycle began, I merged a couple of enhancements to PDO_OCI attribute handling. Specifically I added $dbh->getAttribute() support for ATTR_SERVER_VERSION, ATTR_SERVER_INFO, ATTR_CLIENT_VERSION and. ATTR_AUTOCOMMIT. At the moment these are only available in the PHP snapshots on http://snaps.php.net/. Let me know if there are any issues so they can be resolved before the next PHP release.

He gives examples of two things - the pre-fetching functionality, allowing for better optimization for a query, and the transaction management features, making it as simple as a try{} block to test the commit and rollback if needed.

He also mentions other properties/attributes included in the new release - ATTR_PERSISTENT, ATTR_TIMEOUT, ATTR_ORACLE_NULLS, ATTR_CASE and ATTR_ERRMODE, ATTR_SERVER_VERSION and ATTR_CLIENT_VERSION (the last two have examples).

Lukas Smith notes in this new blog post that the next releases for his MDB2 package should be just around to corner.

He's been working on several issues:

• fixing issues with MySQL drivers
• updating transaction support to add SAVEPOINTS
• integrating a debug callback mechanism

The only two bug reports I am currently hoping to get resolved before the next release are: a MySQL issue getting the last ID and a problem with an internal datatype.

Keep an eye out for his next release.