Todays special guest is Davey Shafik. If you are a regular listener of PHP Abstract, you will recognize Davey's name from previous podcasts. For those of you new to PHP Abstract, Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both magazine articles and books. Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from his unique perspective. Today, Davey is going to rant a bit about APIs.

The show can either be downloaded directly, listen to the show via the built-in web player, or you can subscribe to the podcast's feed to get this and more great content from PHP Abstract.

Stubbles is a new framework for PHP 5.2 which focuses on clean OO design, the use of patterns and ports some features from the langauges commonly referred to "enterprise languages" to PHP. If you are looking for new ways to develop your PHP applications, you should definitely take a look at the stubReflection package, which brings Java Annotations to PHP. The next issue of the German PHP Magazin will feature an article, that shows how to use this package.

The blog has been set up to give the community a window into the framework abd will include things like tutorials, thoughts on the framework and its direction, and maybe a little general PHP talk to balance things out. Check out the framework and the blog at stubbles.org.

Contributors to the Zend Framework must first sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before they're allowed to commit anything. This is claimed to make the Zend Framework "IP clean", so big corporations have no problem adopting it.

I've never believed in this proclaimed need of being "IP clean". Maybe that's because stealing someone's proprietary code never came to mind - am I just to good a person? However, in a world where in certain strange countries (I won't drop any names here) you can actually patent software - or worse, ideas - it is increasingly difficult to write a single line of code that you can be sure of not violating anyone else's so-called intellectual property.

He quotes from the CLA's FAQ on the Framework site about the protection this CLA offers to both the Framework and to the developers that contribute to it.

His rebuttal is one of "how can this be enforced?", which, of course, he realizes is just not possible. He casts a "marketing first" light on the CLA, suggesting that it's just a way to help sell it to corporations.

He looks at eight different topics:

• It's the execution model
• Excellent database support
• PHP Arrays
• The SPL Extension
• PHP 5(.1) XML Support
• The stuff that says it works...works
• Unicode and ICU
• Stuck in Little boxes

For each of them he explains them briefly, dispelling any rumors that might have come up from those not as experienced with the PHP language.

Update: if you'd like to help promote it, it's been digged.]]> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:59:12 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4394 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4394 PHP 5.1.1 the other day with a quick blog post on their sites. Ilia Alshanetsky has just a bit more in his extended version, including his rant on the "hurried release" of this latest edition.

The initial and probably the main reason for the PHP 5.1.1 release in such a hurry was a rather interesting problem. One of the features introduced by 5.1.0 was the addition of the native "date" class. The eventual plan was to enable additional ext/date functionality via this class through a series of methods that have already been written.

The real "fun" began a couple of hours after the release when Pierre-Alain Joye posted a message titled "PHP 5.1 (Or How to break tousands of apps out there)", whose title was certain to provoke a reaction and boy, did it ever.

He continues, talking more about the dissention that it caused on the internals mailing list. He does mention, however, that the bugs.php.net site was interestingly quiet the whole time. With Ilia being the "Release Master" for the 5.1 series, he decided eventually to pull it back and wait until a future date to make the date class release...]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2005 05:37:11 -0600