As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.

The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.

Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.

PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

EllisLab is proud to announce the release of CodeIgniter 1.6, our open source web application framework. The release marks a new turn in the development of the framework, and has received considerable attention from both EllisLab developers and the community.

There's lots of new features in this new release including a Database Forge class, improvements to their Active Record implementation, an extendable Model class, and the addition of extendable Helpers.

You can find out more about the framework on the project's homepage or just head straight to the downloads section and grab the latest updates.

Probably the most important improvement to SeleniumTestCase is the fact that you can now run each test using a set of browsers instead of just one browser. [...] Other improvements to SeleniumTestCase include more robust error handling and better error messages.

To illustrate the "run each test in multiple browsers" feature, Sebastian includes the code for a test that runs three times, once for three different types of browsers - IE, Safari, and Firefox.

The main focus of 0.6.2 has been managing module resources so that they are completely independent from the core framework and are easy to install. To that end, everything a module might need can now be bundled in a single archive which can be unzipped in the modules directory, and Seagull will take care of everything else during the install process.

Modules can now additionally contain any template or data resources, which include HTML, CSS, js and a range of data files. With the possibility of adding additional include paths, and config or setup files on a per-module basis, it's much easier to incorporate advanced features into your projects without touching the core.

They list out some of the new core features the framework now has to offer including:

• web-based installer now easier to use (Dmitri Lakachauskis)
• Improved Ajax integration with Prototype with new docs added (Julien Casanova)
• Added ability to add custom data to your modules, makes it easier to diverge from svn code, create file called data.custom.my.sql for this purpose
• Input URL parsing strategies now configurable
• Added an overlay debug block, displays system info

You can download this latest version from the Seagull Project's homepage and get documentation/help from the forums or the mailing list.

"PhpED 5 is now available. It's the biggest release ever in our 7-year history, with all-new tools for PHP code folding, embedded Mozilla browser, a powerful database form wizard, a completely new look and feel and so much more."

Alllrighty, I'll have me some of that! I logged in, grabbed the new version, backed-up all of my config settings, and installed with fingers crossed. Here is what I've found so far, along with the answer to the million dollar question - are the new features worth the upgrade fee?

He goes through some of the "more needed" features that a lot of developers look for - code folding, a nice, clean, easy to work with interface, and some new features to make it worth the upgrade. Of course, nothing is perfect, so there are a few recommendations he makes - versioning support (CVS and Subversion), the ability to locally stage files, and a useful search and replace.

One of my complaints was the Zend_Cache did not accept lifetimes on a per object basis, but rather the lifetime was at an application level. I just received notice in my inbox that the issue has been fixed! The change is currently in svn, and should be in the 0.80 preview release. Thanks go to Fabien for the fix.

You can download this latest version of the Framework (0.7.0) from the Zend Framework website.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.

The problem with that solution is that it requires you to change the way you define your model relations. [...] Rather try to change your code to suit your needs, and let CakePHP do what it does best: act as a framework.

The technique approaches the associations differently - loaded and called when you make the call to expects() versus just automatically. They include the code to make it all work for an extension to the Model (AppModel), and extension to the AppModel (Title), and finally the TitlesController that shows the deliberate calls to expects to pull in the models.