In a new post to the Laravel News site, they've shared the announcement about the release of the first Release Candidate for PHP 7.3.x: PHP 7.3.0RC1.

PHP 7.3 is inching closer to general release (planned for December), with today’s announcement of the first PHP 7.3 release candidate:

The post also shares the upcoming timeline for the releases leading up to PHP 7.3.0 (stable) with the first beta release planned for November 20th. They also list out (and link to more information) for some of the features coming in 7.3 including:

• Trailing Commas in function calls
• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax
• list() reference assignment

Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site sharing some of the new features and updates to Laravel that were announced at Laracon US 2017. This is the second post in his series covering what's new in Laravel 5.5.

He was updating the post as the items were announced (live-blogging) and now the post has the complete list:

• Frontend presets
• New routing options
• Blade::if
• Renderable mailable
• Renderable Exceptions
• Responsable interface
• One-off Notifications
• Validation improvements
• TrustedProxy package brought internally
• Migrate:fresh
• New database migration trait
• WithoutExceptionHandling middleware
• Dusk improvements
• Package auto-discovery
• Vendor:publish menu
• Auto-registered console commands
• Job chaining
• Better missing model handling in jobs

As you can see the list is quite long and filled with both updates to current functionality and with new features. Check out the full post for information on each - some come with descriptions and other with commands/code to show them in action.

On thePHP.cc site there's a new post sharing what you need to know about migrating your PHPUnit installation up to PHPUnit 6 from previous versions.

The first version of PHPUnit 6 was released today. Today also marks the End of Life of PHPUnit 4. What does this mean for you? The answer to this question depends on which versions of PHP and PHPUnit you currently use.

They break the reminder of the article down into three sections:

• what you'll need to change to update from PHPUnit 4
• what you'll need to change to update from PHPUnit 5
• what kinds of things come with PHPUnit 6 that "you'll want to use"

This last section includes updates like the changes to namespacing, having "risky" test checking enabled by default, deprecated APIs and the ability to export a log file JUnit will understand.

The Laravel Podcast has posted their latest episode, Episode #39, with host Matt Stauffer and regular guests Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way.

In this episode, the crew discusses the status and features of Laravel 5.2, Lumen 5.2, and Spark.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show directly. You can get information about the latest episodes as they're released from their feed or by following them on Twitter.

In this post to the HHVM blog they answer a common question they get from the development community: why don't they use LLVM for code generation when compiling down the PHP.

The primary reason has always been that while LLVM is great at optimizing C, C++, Objective-C, and other similar statically-typed languages, PHP is dynamically typed. The kinds of optimizations that provide huge performance benefits for static languages tend to be less useful in dynamic languages, or at least overshadowed by all the dynamic dispatching that’s done based on runtime types. We knew that there was probably something to be gained from using LLVM as a backend, but there were many larger opportunities go after first.

They talk about the compilation pipeline HHVM uses and shows the difference between how it works versus how LLVM would integrate into the final steps. They also talk about the work put in to explore the use of LLVM IR and what kind of changes they had to make to support it. This includes updates to PHP function call handling, generalizing vasm and updates to the LLVM tool itself (with changes to location records, smashable calls and performance tweaks among others).

The PHP development group has officially released the alpha3 of PHP 5.4 as ready for testing. Rasmus Lerdorf comments:

PHP 5.4 alpha3 is available for testing now. Please give us a hand and compile it on your platform and run a "make test". Download it from http://qa.php.net and you can see the changes in the NEWS file at http://t.co/bBVGj8P

Updates in this alpha include the shortened array syntax, binary numbers format, support for the "Class::{expr}()" syntax, removal of magic quotes related features, a change to include E_STRICT in E_ALL and several others. Head over to the PHP QA site and download this latest version to test in your environment. Remember, environments are unique, so the more test results the better - it helps make for a better quality end result.

The latest version of the Zend Framework, 1.7.0, has officially been released:

The Zend Framework team would like to thank everyone who made this release possible. As always, our generous ZF community has provided countless new features, bug fixes, documentation translations, etc. We'd also like to thank Adobe Systems and Wade Arnold for contributing the new Zend_Amf component. A big thanks to PHP Belgium and everyone who participated in bug hunt day and/or the Zend Framework bug hunt week.

This update includes lots of new components and features such as: an update to Dojo, Zend_Service_Twitter, support for Open Office Documents in the Zend_Search_Lucene component, Zend_ProgressBar, I18N improvements and much, much more. Check out the full list on this post on the Zend Developer Zone or just head over the download the latest edition.

You can also check out some of Matthew Weier O'Phinney's comments over on his blog as well as thoughts from Zend's own Andi Gutmans on his blog.

On Pierre's blog today, there's a release announcement about the "long awaited for" version of his Filter extension - version 0.1.0.0.

This release will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0RC3, which is likely to be the last RC. Please report any trouble you find, and post your feedback (here, on the pecl-dev mailing list or in the issue tracker), it will help provide the best possible extension in the 5.2.0 release. A stable filter release should still hit the road this year.

Feature additons for this release include an input_get_args method, support for PHP's pcre expressions, JIT support, and support for custom decimal spacers. Several behaviors were changed as well, including when a value is FALSE or NULL, updates to the integer/float parser, and the default filter now being set to "raw".

You can get the complete listing of updates on the project from the Changelog and check out the project and all of its documentation on it's PECL homepage.

On Pierre's blog today, there's a release announcement about the "long awaited for" version of his Filter extension - version 0.1.0.0.

This release will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0RC3, which is likely to be the last RC. Please report any trouble you find, and post your feedback (here, on the pecl-dev mailing list or in the issue tracker), it will help provide the best possible extension in the 5.2.0 release. A stable filter release should still hit the road this year.

Feature additons for this release include an input_get_args method, support for PHP's pcre expressions, JIT support, and support for custom decimal spacers. Several behaviors were changed as well, including when a value is FALSE or NULL, updates to the integer/float parser, and the default filter now being set to "raw".

You can get the complete listing of updates on the project from the Changelog and check out the project and all of its documentation on it's PECL homepage.

The Symfony Project has posted an update on this blog about the progress they're making towards version 1.0 of their framework, including a detailed list of new additions.

If you watch the timeline, you probably noticed the important number of updates of these last days. If you opened a ticket, you also probably noticed that more than 160 tickets were fixed since 0.6.3. There are a lot of changes in symfony lately (see the changelog for the full list), and here is a brief overview of the important stuff.

Included in the list are things like:

• Many-to-many relationships
• New CLI tasks
• AJAX actions have no layout by default
• my* Classes
• Validators