2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers. This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

Among the important happenings of this past year he mentions the issues surrounding PHP6, HipHop and PHP running on the Andriod platform. He speculates on a few things that we can expect from PHP in the upcoming year(s) like the release of PHP 5.4. Also included are some updates that were made to the PHPClasses.org site itself.

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Rightly or wrongly, many in our community see Perl 6 as the definitive example of vaporware. But what about PHP 6? This release was first discussed by the PHP core developers back in 2005. There have been books on the shelves purporting to cover PHP 6 since at least 2008. But, in March 2010, the PHP 6 release is not out - in fact, it is not even close to out. Recent events suggest that PHP 6 will not be released before 2011 - if, indeed, it is released at all.

He talks about features that were supposed to disappear in PHP6 (with some of them making their way into PHP 5.3) including the Unicode support the language needs more and more. He mentions how the development has stalled out a bit recently but has been spurred back to life when major decisions were made to get away from a PHP 5.4 branch and move back to PHP6.

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Yesterday the stagnation created by the situation has been resolved and it was decided that our trunk in svn will be based on 5.3 and we'll merge features from the old trunk and new features there so that 5.3 will be a true stable branch. The EOL for 5.2 has not yet been defined but I suggest you to really migrate over to 5.3, which usually can be done with very little work, as soon as possible.

Discussion are being made about which type of Unicode support will actually be introduced with a "string class" wrapper gathering some support behind it to provide an alternative to the current string handling.

Consider you have an application tied to an environment with a special terminology, then translating this terms to English might be extremely confusing (especially as programmers often don't really know the correct terminology of that domain) and it's good to call the thing by it's name [...] The purpose of this were some bad news: That's nothing new. The relevant scanner rule hasn't changed since 4.0 - the only change is that PHP 6 doesn't treat it as random set of bytes anymore but knows about Unicode codepoints and interprets is as such.

After digging around a bit in some of the commit history of PHP, Johannes also found that the scanner rule (what parses the identifiers) hasn't changed since around 2000 and, apparently, won't be changing for PHP6 either.

So, every once in a while I find myself in need of trying out newer, maybe, not-yet-released features in PHP. For example, recently, I wanted to test RoundCube PHP6 '" this is how I did it. On a side note, the same setup would also work for testing code with previous versions of PHP.

Everything's there - from the configure commands to the settings that'll need changing to the commands you'll need to use to get things started up right.

In "The Art Of Deception Or Publishing PHP6 Books" I aired my unflattering opinions about publishers who have been selling "PHP 6" books. PHP 6, last I checked, was a bit like Leprechauns. [...] It's certainly not complete and stable, and its future feature list remains a bit flexible. You could see PHP 5.4 in 2011 before PHP 6 is finished...guessing here. As its developers would say - it'll be ready when it's ready. One day. Maybe.

He shares their response to his comments by looking at easy of the books covering PHP6 and two things they're doing to help the situation - pulling the Beginner book and a call for those wanting to make the books better to get involved.

I was strolling around a bookstore today, Easons on O'Connell Street here in Dublin, when I found myself staring at a bookshelf in near shock. Kid, I thought, you've been out of the loop for only two months and somehow those crazy people have managed to release PHP 6 right under your nose! [...] The more I stared at the three youthful faces grinning at me from the cover, the more I convinced myself this was a publishing error. No way was PHP6 going to be released without me noticing. Google Reader would have been on fire with that news. So what the hell was I looking at? I was apparently looking at a big fat lie.

He goes on to talk about PHP6 (aka the "long standing grail" of PHP) and how publishers, apparently misinformed as to the release date of the version, preempted its release and assumed that it would be out as soon as or before the book was. Obviously this was the wrong choice and now they're paying for it with the egg on their face.

Sure these PHP6 books have a lot of the PHP 5.3 features mentioned in them, but they're mashed up with other features that won't be ready until PHP6 actually arrives. Oddly enough, upon looking at the contents of most of the books, Padraic discovered something interesting - their content is less about PHP6 and more about the PHP 5.2 series that was current. Seems they're only really PHP6 in name.

I'm currently working on [a project] where I've been experimenting with 'domain objects' having 'scalar' or 'value' objects as properties (more on that later).

The talks specifically about two of the upcoming features - type hinting and the __cast magic method that allows you to correctly cast a variable into a different type. He illustrates with some code that handles and manipulates user data and handles exceptions on an incorrect type cast.

PHP 5.3 is just around the corner with a lot of great new features. However, even if I'm really excited about this new release, I won't make yet another PHP 5.3 feature list; I will rather look at the future of PHP. PHP core developers met at php|tek and discussed the future of PHP. And it is really great to see that they plan lots of wonderful features; let's set aside the Unicode stuff.

His list of things he's looking forward to include __cast, ArrayObject/ArrayAccess' wider acceptance, traits, C#-style properties and more.