This new post to the PHPClasses.org blog take a look at some of the new features that will be included in the PHP 5.3 release (coming soon to a web server near you!) by way of an interview with Lukas Smith.

his article presents an interview with core PHP developer Lukas Kahwe Smith that has pushed many of the new features of PHP 5.3 as release manager. Lukas talks about PHP 5.3 new features such as lambda functions, closures and PHAR support. He also explains what are traits, which for now it is a feature that was left out of PHP 5.3. He also talks about future PHP 5.x and PHP 6, as well how anybody can help in the development of PHP to make it come out faster.

They talk about the PHP.net wiki, briefly touch on the PHP 5.3 feature updates, performance/memory usage in the new version, Lambda functions, closures and PHAR and what's to come with PHP 6.

Gergely Hodicska continues his series on what's coming up in the next major PHP release with a new post covering the new mysql native driver (mysqlnd) that'll be included.

In the first two parts of this series I wrote about namaspaces and late static binding. In this part I will cover mysqlnd (MySQL native driver for PHP), which is also a really cool feature of PHP 5.3. This a replacement library (not an extension) for libmysql (MySQL Client Library) offering a lot of advantage over it.

He includes some of the reasoning why its a better choice, how it's integrated with the Zend Engine, the memory savings that it will give you and some of the functionality included with it like persistent connections, client-side query caching and statistical data collection functions.

As mentioned in Knut Urdalen's latest blog entry, the folks from Waterproof Software have announced a new extension that will be included with their upcoming version of PHPEdit (2.12) - "a Prado extension for syntax highlighting, code insight and and code hint".

This combined with the PHPUnit support in the same upcoming versions should make for quite the powerful tool. Check out the posting if you want more information on being a beta tester.

Chris Shiflett has posted a reminder of some of the upcoming Open Source related conferences for the next few months including:

• php|tek (in Chicago)
• eLiberatica (in Romania)
• OSCON (in Oregon

He's also included brief summaries of what each is about for you to pick out which you might want to attend. In the comments of the post, he mentions yet another conference (just passed unfortunately) for UKers - the PHPConference UK.

Several developers/speakers around the PHP community has posted their upcoming schedules for conferences and what they're presenting. Here's just a few:

• Andi Gutmans - AjaxWorld Conference & Expo ("How and Why PHP Makes a Successful Back End for AJAX"), SD West 2007 ("Modern Web Applications & PHP"), MySQL Conference & Expo ("The State of PHP and MySQL"), and an IBM webcast ("Vista Powering Rich Internet Applications with Zend Core for IBM").
• Mike Potter - Portland PHP user group meeting (PHP & Flex)
• Sara Golemon - php|tek 2007 (Writing Extensions and Security PHP Applications)

Keep checking back to this post for some further updates as they're posted by other speakers. There's loads of conferences happening in 2007 (more popping up all the time)!

Following on the heels of these comments from Alexander Netkachev, the Zend Developer Zone has posted the full project plan for the next release of the PHP IDE Zend is working on, version 0.7.

The plan of the 0.7 version is based on the initial SRS which is available here. On top of that SRS many bugs were submitted together with enhancement requests that were/will be included in the 0.7 release. You can find all PHP IDE open bugs here.

The announcement is broken up into three sections - the release deliverables, the release milestones, and the target operating environments - each with plenty of details to show you exactly what the team is working towards.

Ilia Alshanetsky is asking the crowd for comments in his latest blog entry, specificalyl about the new filter extension coming in the next major PHP 5 series release - version 5.2.

What I am interested in hearing is are there any other common types of data collected by PHP forms that would be worth while adding filters for into the extension. My own suggestions would be the phone (US/EU formats) and postal/zip code validators.

Comments on have already been made ranging from date validation improvements to input validation. Head on over and add your own comments/ideas to the mix...

The Yahoo-acquired site Upcoming.org has released a new (PHP 5 only) wrapper class for interfacing with their backend API. The Zend Developer Zone has the full story.

On Sept 28, 2006, Upcoming.org released it's new PHP 5 (only) wrapper class. Details can be found here and the wiki page can be found here.

The wiki page lists the prerequsites you'll need to use the wrapper (including SimpleMXL, PEAR's Cache::Lite, and the API documentation) as well as a simple "getting started" guide to making requests. There are a few issues they mention happening with the package, so keep an eye out for future updates.

With great new advancements coming out of PHP with each new version released, the list of things that are being worked toward for PHP 6 bears some repeating for what we have to look forward to. PHPHacks.com has just that posted today.

The PHP world is really excited about the upcoming release of PHP 6.0. Amongst all the uncertainties in any new release, PHP 6.0 seems to be getting rid of three of the earlier troublesome features: register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc and safe_mode. The first was a big security hole, the second messed with the data and made changing environments quite difficult, while the third was usually misread, and provided a false sense of security. There's also quite a lot of work scheduled to do with Unicode.

Other large changes are mentioned as well, like the the addition of new 64-bit integers and that the ereg extension is removed, while the XMLReader, XMLWriter and Fileinfo extensions are added to the core, and by default are on. Check out the entire post for the full listing.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a new item today with examples of the improvements that he's made to the HTML output that PHPUnit 3 will offer.

Inspired by the layout of the Code Coverage Analysis for PHP that is generated using gcov and lcov, I decided to improve the out-of-the-box generation of HTML Code Coverage reports for the upcoming PHPUnit 3.

The screenshots show things like a new overall summary page, sub-rpoject summary pages, and coverage report examples.