PHP 5.3 was released 6/30/09. It brings some big changes to PHP -- among them: namespaces, closures, a few shortcuts, nowdoc, and changes to heredoc and PHP.ini.
Be sure to read the Migration Guide before upgrading to the latest and greatest.
Some of the things that came up today:
Doing a simple data query from Drupal
http://drupal.org/node/83874
Two CMS apps that look very mature but many of us hadn't heard of yet.
Typolight - http://www.typolight.org/
ModX - http://modxcms.com/
Surreal CMS - http://surrealcms.com/
This made me go look up some good sources of CMS recomendations
http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-open-source-cms-php-finalists
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-more-php-frameworks-and-cms
http://php.opensourcecms.com/
IDE's coupled with Hosting
http://www.aptana.com/
Using Google Picasa to host/manage images for a website
Using Yahoo Pipes or Google Reader to aggregate rss feeds
Google Wave
http://wave.google.com/
Noah pointed out a new MVC framework he has been looking at. Hopefully, he will get some time to play with it soon. Looks super light, and clean.
http://Kohanaphp.com
Eric pointed out some changes he has been seeing in the Zend Framework, especially in a command line system called Zend Tool.
http://devzone.zend.com/article/3811
http://devzone.zend.com/article/4559
Another nice feature of it, is when you create your initial project, you can easily define which stage your project is in. This then controls things like the verbosity of your error pages.
Eric also pointed out that there is a new version of Lime Survey--Now with cool graphs!
Plenty of other chatting going on. Firefox plugins, the future of MySQL, jobs out there, and more.
Hope to see you next month!
Recently, Oracle announced that it will acquire Sun and of course it gets MySQL in the deal (Slashdot).
This obviously casts some doubt on MySQL's future, so I'd like to point out some MySQL fork projects. Several ex-MySQL developers have been busy and there's already some promising alternatives to the original.
MariaDB: This community driven project is named after a new database engine. The original MyISAM developers are working on an engine that is suitable both for transactional and non-transactional uses. This is no doubt intended to help them steer clear of Oracle's claims on InnoDB technology.
Drizzle: Reversing a long trend of MySQL working to be a more credible enterprise solution, this project is focused on making a lighter database. Their first milestone has focused on cleaning up the code and cutting the fat.
OurDelta: Also driven by ex-MySQL gurus, this fork appears to be the most mainstream and looks like it will pick up where MySQL left off.
also on my blog
This month we had nice chat about :
- developer.yahoo.com, developer.yahoo.com/yui/, pipes.yahoo.com
- www.limesurvey.org
- Eclipse PDT - IDE for PHP with Debugging
- wordpress.org
- joomla.org
- Drupal