An important discussion on the PHP "internals" development mailing list is taking place. It's one that you should take some note of. It concerns the next step in transitioning PHP applications away from the very old mysql extension and towards adopting the much better mysqli extension or PDO_MYSQL driver for PDO. This would allow the mysql extension to, at some as-yet undetermined time in the future, be removed.

He links to a RFC that's been posted to help promote and push this idea forward with mentions of the "carrot" and "stick" methods for pushing users towards mysqli.

As always, there is a lot of guesswork going on as to what MySQL APIs are in current use by PHP applications, how those applications are deployed, and what their upgrade cycle is. [...] I want to repeat that no time frame for the eventual removal of the mysql extension is set. I expect it to be some years away.

A short time ago today, I submitted a PHP RFC for discussion which proposes adding an SPL Escaper class and, quite possibly, a related set of functions dedicated to escaping data for output to HTML/XML to PHP: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/escaper. The RFC itself should be a good read if you want to understand why I'm proposing this but the basics are quite simple. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the two most common security vulnerabilities in web applications - the other being SQL Injection. Despite this, PHP's offering of escaping functions is extremely limited.

He talks about what problems the proposed solution solves and how it could help protect PHP programmers more effectively than the more complicated methods they have to go through now. If you're interested in reading the conversations so far, you can start here and walk through the messages.

The internals list is the place to be to hear about the current state of PHP. It is one of PHP's many mailing lists, but this is the one where (core) developers discuss new features, current bugs and wild ideas. If you want to keep up with things it is a good idea to sign up, it is not an extremely high volume list and if you ignore the noise it is quite informative. In this article I would like to share examples of stuff typically discussed on the list.

He mentions feature requests in general and, more specifically things like traits support (multiple inheritance), array dereferencing, callable arrays and the debate over the short array syntax.

You may be wondering why you would want type hinting in a dynamic language. This can come in very handy especially if you are looking to enforce a specific type or need to ensure that you are indeed working with say an integer. Since this is written in C, it will be far faster than actually type casting it yourself or enforcing it yourself. General speed improvements are always nice to have.

He includes two code examples of it in use and points to the php.internals mailing list for the vote count either way. So far (as of the time of those post) the results seem mixed with some recommending it outright while others suggest waiting until the spec is completely done before integration (PHP6?).

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

The problem isn't that namespaces are bad, it's that these arcane structures seem to have so little impact on development in PHP today for many many people. Does that mean it's unimportant?

He talks about the real value of namespaces, a comparison to type hinting's inclusion, the current amount of (needless?) traffic on the php.internals list and his opinions on why namespaces are valid.

As an outsider looking in, and being a realist instead of a fanboy, I'm finding it extremely hard to believe that PHP is going to continue its much hyped and proclaimed success in its current circumstances.

From his point of view there's a few things that, if the web was exposed to (like "tiffs that occur on PHP Internals") PHP's popularity would fade quite a bit.

As much as I hate to say this...You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs. I've been watching the Dev List over there and following it as well, and I don't see even half of the virtual crap-flinging that's almost become an everyday occurrence on the PHP Internals list.