Hang on, weren't we up to OCI8 version 1.3? Well, yes, but that's Beta bordering on Production. In the meantime, I wanted to make the OCI8 bug fixes from PHP 5.2.6 available in a "Production" release and keep PECL OCI8 1.2 in sync with PHP 5.2. The changelog is here.

Updates include bug fixes for cursor leaking, a LOB leak, a problem with collection creation and an update to the compile option for the Instant Client to look for RPMs.

• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

You can check out more information on the projects (including links to their individual pages) on this page of the Google Code website.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.

Matthew talks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.

VLD is for the "hardcore hackers" out there to see what's happening behind the scenes for each request made to PHP and the translit extension makes it easier to "transliterate" information into other formats (with filters like "normalize_numbers" and converting text to Chinese).

You can grab the updated version through the standard pecl interface or from their pages on the PECL site.

• Phar now supports tar and zip archives with the same API that is supports phar archives.
• Phar has a front controller for web applications that fully handles MIME types, supports mod_rewrite-like functionality with far more flexibility
• Phar supports phar:// stream wrappers in include_path for PHP 5.2+
• Phar supports creation and modification of data-only tar and zip archives (no executable phar stub) via the PharData class.

There've also been updates to the manual for the project to reflect this new version of its API. You can download this latest version here: source or Windows DLL.