I am glad to announce the availability of the first alpha version of PDO_MYSQLND. PDO_MYSQLND is a PHP PDO driver for MySQL based on the MySQL native driver. PDO_MYSQLND 1.0.2-alpha is available for download on http://downloads.mysql.com/forge/pdo_mysqlnd_preview.

Updates include fixes for return values, patches for memory leaks, more code coverage and some "very promising results" running on a set of dedicated testing machines.

I'd like to let you know about a new PHP 5 implementation of the Akismet REST API. The package, Services_Akismet is MIT licensed and distributed through the official PEAR channel at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Akismet.

Hopefully this will make it even easier for third-party PHP projects to use Akismet spam tools. The code is well documented and should "just work" on any PHP 5.2.1+ system.

It's currently in its alpha stage and was derived from the miPHP Akismet class written by Bret Kuhns.