Today it has been ten years since the first release of Xdebug: version 0.7.0. I would like to celebrate this tenth anniversary with a new release: Xdebug 2.2.0. Xdebug 2.2 adds support for PHP 5.4 and provides some new features.

There's five new things on his list of updates in this latest release:

• Colours on the command line
• Better support for closures in stack and function traces
• The size of arrays is now shown with the overloaded variable output
• Added the method call type to xdebug_get_function_stack
• Extra information to error printouts to tell that the error suppression operator has been ignored due to xdebug.scream

If you've found XDebug handy for testing and finding those tough to track bugs over the years, you should consider buying "support" to show Derick your appreciation (oh, and you also get a "first in" preference on your XDebug questions)!

Although purists have always sneered upon PHP for being a "patched" language; the evolution of PHP over the years, with new features added in every version, has only increased its popularity. The latest 5.4 release has followed the trend with some major feature additions. The following post describes some important changes in PHP 5.4.

His list includes: the updated array syntax, the bulit-in web server, array dereferencing, traits, upload progress tracking and various core changes to things like the short syntax for calling static methods in classes and the complete remval of magic quotes.

PHP 5.4 is here; the next major step forward since version 5.3 - keeping PHP 6 (full Unicode support) on hold for now. The latest enhancements significantly improve its elegance, while removing deprecated functionality, resulting in a dramatic optimization of the runtime (up to 20% more speed and memory usage reduction).

They hit all of the highlights:

• Traits
• Built-in CLI Web-Server
• Shorter Array Syntax
• Array Dereferencing
• $this In Anonymous Functions
• <?= is Always On
• Binary Number Representation
• Callable Typehint
• Initialized High Precision Timer

Code examples are provided where relevant.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

I've been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

The two he mentions deal with a new warning on illegal string offsets and the other about string offsets ("Notice: String offset cast occurred"). You can find out about more changes in the PHP 5.4 series in the various Changelogs for each Release Candidate and beta release.

Recently, the voting process for PHP 5.4 open to committers and users have been closed. We now have a clear picture of what will make the release and what will be left out. Some of these features (traits, web server) were already in, while other have been just voted and will be completed before the general availability of the release.

He lists out some of the major changes that'll be coming in the 5.4 release including traits, dereferencing, the built-in HTTP server, closure type hinting and the upload progress feature previously only in an extension. The end of the post includes a poll for you to give your feedback on what you think is the most important. As of the time of this post, the array dereferencing has pulled into the lead with traits coming in second.

So we all know that the internet is full of frameworks. They've been the popular thing for the last 5 or 6 years and it seems to have become the "barrier for entry" or the "passage of rights" that 8 or 9 years ago used to be "hey I just wrote a phpBB clone!". There are plenty around but in this day in age, why would anyone write a new one? As somebody involved in a new PHP framework - Fuel - that has shaken a few opinions up I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and views on the situation.

While he agrees that there are plenty of other frameworks out there, maybe too many to choose from, he thinks that there's value in making something that's useful to you and the toolsets you're already used to. One of their goals with Fuel is to "make PHP as fun to use" as possible and things like built-in migrations and scaffolding (along with a command-line tool, Oil) help towards that goal.

A framework is essentially a way to put all of your best practises into a single place so that you can reuse them over and over again. This should make you more efficient and make your time more financially viable to clients. If the framework you use slows you down or does not cater for the way you like to develop then sack it off and do your own thing.

One of the difficult parts of framework adoption, especially in the PHP world, is about choosing the right framework. There is a proliferation of open source solutions and a team must analyze the overall picture thoroughly before locking itself into a particular framework. Changing the framework which an application is built with without shaking its foundations would be probably impossible after a certain period of development.

He lists a few of the things he looks for in a framework - functionality, performance, community and a good license - and asks for some feedback (in the form of a poll) as to which you'd prefer to use next. He's narrowed it down to four options: Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter and CakePHP. (Expect plenty of comments asking "what about [insert framework here]?")

As a long-time internals.php mailing list reader I am going to tell you a small secret - the first alpha release for PHP 5.4 should be just around the corner. This release is packed with some welcome new language features, usual bug fixes followed by some performance and memory management improvements. One of the noteworthy language additions are Traits - a brand new horizontal code reuse mechanism.

He explains traits as a better way to do the "kind-of" inheritance that PHP does now with parent and child classes, making it easier to reuse functionality from classes even though they don't share the same parent. With the "use" keyword (not to be confused with the "use" keyword in namespaces) you can include common functionality into class methods and even accommodate for naming conflicts and requirements.

The SPL, or Standard PHP Library, is an often overlooked extension in the PHP core. It first came on the scene in PHP 5 and a variety of iterators constituted the majority of its initial offerings. Though the iterator offerings were expanded in PHP 5.3, the particularly interesting additions to the SPL were several specialized data structure classes, the foundational concepts for which originate in the field of computer science. In this post, I will provide an overview of these new classes and explain why and when they should be used.

Matthew talks about some of the new advancements in working with arrays, creating fixed arrays, handling lists (linked and doubly-linked), stackes, queues, heaps and hash maps. He also includes some benchmark information and graphs of some tests he ran comparing the SPL methods to some of their normal PHP counterparts.