With CakePHP 2.0, they have dropped support for PHP 4 and have refactored the library code to make it strictly complaint with PHP 5.2+. Modeled on Ruby on Rails (RoR), CakePHP is a tough competition to Zend framework, Symfony and CodeIgniter.

Besides the topics mentioned above, he also goes into the details of the new CakeRequest and CakeResponse models (to access information about teh current request/response). Summaries of all of the new functionality are provided along with some sample code where needed to illustrate.

I'm a developer and I don't want to fiddle with setting up and maintaining an operating system, basically since I don't have the time for it. [...] I was completely sold when Josh Holmes came to Brussels in 2009 and told us more about what Windows Azure has to offer and how perfectly it is to build applications consuming these cloud services, without having to deal with setting up and maintaining the platform the run on.

He points out just a few of the features of an Azure instance - pre-installed OS (similar to Windows 2008 Server + IIS7), the five types of storage available (including Queue, SQL Azure and Blob storage). He also mentions working with file uploads, sessions, caching, database interaction and a brief comparison of cloud versus non-cloud scaling methods. In the next part of his series, he'll get more practical and show how to set up a Zend Framework application on an Azure instance.

In part 2 he talks about a patch that's been applied to help with errors in the autoloading process and throw an exception if something's' not found.

Part 3 talks about an update to help make the pathing shorter on the Doctrine configuration files and the ability to move it to a centralized mapping file in the app/config.

There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc. It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself (the generated Ubuntu packages), you can get more information over on the Launchpad page for the project. As always, feedback is welcome on the PHP internals list about your experiences.

We have talked quite a bit about Symfony2 earlier in this blog, and like everyone else we are really excited about it. It is a complete rewrite of the framework taking advantage of many of the newest features of PHP 5.3, and let me tell you, it is quite amazing.

They've been using the Symfony2 preview releases to power a control panel for their virtual server offerings. He talks about the current state of the project (features including Twig, a HTTP cache, debugging and security tools) and mentions the Symfony Live event happening in San Francisco next week (more here).

You can arm yourself with one of the PHP-based Web development frameworks covered in this article. In the following pages, I'll look closely at the Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Symfony. I'll also give quick overviews of Qcodo, Lithium, Seagull, and Yii. All are open source frameworks, and all implement to one degree or another the MVC (model view controller) architecture pattern. In addition, all purport to help you build a more scalable and more easily maintainable Web application than you could otherwise create from scratch and, most importantly, do so in less time.

The introduce each of the frameworks at a pretty high level and start with their "Test Center Scorecard" showing their overall ratings of each of the four they tested. They link to a few other articles that talk more about the features of each in-depth and give an "at a glance look" as well. The list shows the minimum PHP version required, licensing, level of documentation currently provided and some of the general pros and cons.

Corollary of that is that some clever tricks are better left not done and some cool things may not look that cool when you have to deal with the consequences. That being said, I think there are many cool things yet to be done in PHP. So, I've posted a poll on Programmers.StackExchange site about what people want to see in PHP. I know people regularly post on PHP lists about that, etc. but I think SE crowd would be somewhat different from what is found on PHP internal lists, so it would be interesting to see what people's wishlists for PHP are.

Among the suggestions on the list there's things like: named parameters, an effort to make PHP more truly OOP, better Unicode support - even a working parser someone created to address some of the common concerns about the language. It's good to see some commentors coming back at some of the suggestions with their own opinions too.

In a nutshell, Less CSS is a tool that lets you simplify your CSS style sheet and allows you to extend limited CSS functionality by introducing variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. The original implementation is written in Ruby; however, there is a PHP solution based on LESS CSS called lessphp.

He mentions the good and the bad about using LESS - it can speed up your CSS development time by making it more familiar but it also comes with the caveat that the CSS files have to be generated each time an update is made. He covers some of the basic features of lessphp including variables, mixins, nested rules, operations (improving on already defined rules) and being able to use multiple .less files. He includes a XML snippet that can be dropped into your Ant (or Phing) build to run the generation at deployment time.

Two highly anticipated CMS releases, Drupal 7.x and WordPress 3.x, are both set to appear in the next month or two. Drupal 7 is currently in Alpha release, but is aiming for a Beta release later this month. WordPress is a little bit ahead, having published a Release Candidate on May 28th. In light of the coincidental (?) timing of these two major releases, let's take a look at some of the new features in each release, and see which is more exciting for its respective community.

On the Drupal side of things, he mentions updates like usability improvements, a simpler backend for administration, performance and security improvements and a new interface to download and install modules directly from the interface.

The upcoming WordPress version will, by default, include the multi-user support previously available in a separate download, custom post types and a better system for creating and editing navigation menus.

As far as he's concerned, though, of the two applications (CMSes) the upcoming version of Drupal is going to come out on top. It wins in terms of security, power and flexibility.

Magic methods, which are class methods with specific names, are used to perform various specialized tasks. They are grouped into two: overloading methods and non-overloading methods. [...] Magic functions, which are similar to magic methods, but are just plain functions outside any class. [...] Magic constants, which are similar to constants in notation, but act more like "dynamic" constants. We'll also look at some practical examples of using some of these, and lastly we'll check out what new features PHP 5.3 is going to add.

He looks at the various functions/methods and constants (like __clone, __toString), some of the overloading methods like __call, and magic constants like __FILE__ and __CLASS__. He wraps it up by briefly discussing what PHP 5.3 adds in - a few new magic methods and constants (but no functions).