Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

Thanks everybody for your trust in mysqlnd and your support! We shall try not to disappoint you in the future and continue with the development. Of course, as the core feature mature more and more, we will try to spend time on implementing new, useful tricks and try to provide you with additional documentation, if time permits.

They also include a link to a forum entry from Jurgen Krieger who ran some tests via XDebug and determined that connection times dropped, query times dropped and there was less memory consumption overall gaining an average boost of 1000ms from a page.

Developers will eventually start using it, it will take some time to go from the PHP way to SDO way. It would be easier to jump into SDO once better, more easily interpreted and simple to understand tutorials, code samples, and support is available. IBM tutorials are a little bit technical, with words and complex pictures (UML). Just give me code and explain how it works and let me run with the SDO scissors in my hand.

He talks about the contributions that both Zend and IBM have made to the effort and the lack of features (well, the duplication of current PHP features - XML and database functionality). He has a positive outlook for the overall future of the project, stating that:

I'm quite sure that enough PHP developers are going to embrace SDO in the coming years depending on the coverage it gets that IBM and Zend's investment will pay off in the end.

Several weeks ago I recieved a copy of Pro PHP GTK by Scott Mattocks in the mail. The first surprise, upon opening the package, is that the book is a hardback - a first for me (at least, for a tech book). I assume this is the norm for all APress books these days, which is very cool as the cover price didn't seem to be inflated because of it.

He takes you through a quick tour of the book, mentioning the introductory chapters, a 'ride' through the world of PHP-GTK2 (including widgets), and an example application.

Davey notes that he wouldn't call it a 'fast reader', but the book is still a great resource and he would highly recommend it. It reminded him of how flexible PHP really is, even at creating client-side graphical interfaces.

To start off right, you need to know how the service works and what kind of methods you'll need to access it. They show a simple connection to the service as well as two functions to mark something as spam and to mark it as non-spam (or 'ham' as he calls it). He also links to their development page and to the WordPress plugin that performs the same action.