Following up on all of the craziness that was caused by the suggestion of including type hinting into the PHP core, Ilia Alshaetsky recently posted some of his thoughts on how things turned out and where he'll go from here.

Unfortunately, while initial outpouring of support for inclusion of type hinting into PHP 5.3 and 6 was substantial, it all kinda petered out once more people started voting. To be specific, there is a large amount of support for the feature in general, but very few people seem to think it should go into 5.3. [...] That said, at work we will transition to 5.3 soon, probably around 5.3.2/3 time, so I do need a type hinting patch. To that effect I've cleaned up and improved the old patch based on comments from various people, notably Stas and Dmitry (thank guys) and made a copy that I intend to use for work.

He talks about how the patch works - no more virtual types and no casting support. Three things have been changed to make it all work: modification to the parser, added a getTypeHint function, properly parse type hints in the code.

Tibo Beijen takes his own look at some of what PHP6 will have to offer and talks a bit about how it would have helped him in a current project:

I'm currently working on [a project] where I've been experimenting with 'domain objects' having 'scalar' or 'value' objects as properties (more on that later).

The talks specifically about two of the upcoming features - type hinting and the __cast magic method that allows you to correctly cast a variable into a different type. He illustrates with some code that handles and manipulates user data and handles exceptions on an incorrect type cast.

Max Horvath has released a new version of his PHPTypeSafe (a tool to give you type safety for method calls). Now it's compatible with the upcoming PHP 5.3 release too.

It is now compatible with the current version of PHP 5.3 (right now it is RC2). I think we won't see any major changes with the namespace handling in PHP 5.3 anymore, so I felt I could upgrade the library.

You can clone the source for the tool from its github page and check out the blog post for an example of it in use.

Launching off from this previous post on the Stubbles Blog, two more posts (from two other developers) have been posted on the same subject:

• In this new post, Frank Kleine takes things a step further and talks about the same kind of type hinting but for more types - including arrays and objects. Examples of how he'd expect things to work followed.
• The other post is from Stephan Schmidt again and varies slightly off into the world of Namespaces to be included in PHP6 along with the use of annotations.

Stephan Schmidt has posted some thoughts about type hinting in PHP5 (what's there) and the same kind of functionality for objects in PHP6 (what's to come).

I was very pleased, that PHP 5 introduced type hints, although they are not available for primitives like string, int, boolean, etc. Still, I'd like to see the object type hint introduced in any future version of PHP that allows me to specify, that a method or function only accepts an object, regardless of the type of the object.

He gives the example of Java's handling of the functionality and what PHP does with the same type of code. He also mentions that, via the Reflection API extension, some of this is possible already, so why not just include it from here on out?