Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

As you may know, we have been working for a very long time on the next stable version of symfony. Now the day has come to celebrate the immediate availability of the long awaited 1.1 stable release of the symfony framework!

Just some of the new features include the framework's new architecture, its brand new YAML parser, the bundling of Propel as a plugin and the addition of over 8,500 functional tests to ensure the solid structure of the framework stands.

You can either update/install this latest version with the pear command line functionality or download the package directly from the site.

Apart from the new exciting features we have in symfony 1.1, this version also represents a year of hard work to refactor the internals. Let's dig into symfony internals a bit!

They talk about the new platform that everything is built of off now including the framework itself (complete with diagrams mapping out the different parts of the MVC whole).

HP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

You can find out more about the package and download this latest edition from its PECL page or check out the whitepaper they recent;y wrote up about PHP and Oracle scalability.

Webgrind, the web frontend to Xdebug has been updated to version 0.7 with a few new features like: Support for directly loading a report through hash in url, Visual breakdowns of internal, class and procedural functions and calls to include/require and Version checking.

This new version (0.7) can be downloaded directly from its Google Code page.

I put server in quotes because it is really just a PHP script that handles the caching and talking to the application servers. Apache and other HTTP servers already do a good job talking HTTP to a vast myriad of clients. I did not see any reason to reinvent the wheel.

Features of this new version include a TTL for the cached data, minimal dependencies for the application to use and a small code base consisting of two files. It also handles HTTP 1.1 requests, is transparent and applows pages to dynamically be specifically added and removed from the cache.

You can download this latest version from the project's page on the Google Code website.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

The NetBeans 6.1 release is mostly a release of the candidate announced a few weeks ago - definitely a lot of changes in the overall release, with a heavy focus on web services and re-integration of some of the JSF/JPA tooling. However, the PHP platform - a 16MB or so download that provides a PHP-targeted IDE based on Java - is .. interesting.

Comments on the post talk a lot about the other language support for the IDE with only a few mentioning the PHP support (though the ones that do show promising results).

Feature-for-feature, Eclipse and NetBeans are well matched. In fact, because they are both extensible, any feature gaps between the two can be filled in with third-party plug-ins. Eclipse and Netbeans are rapidly approaching the capabilities of commercial offerings. Most developers won't need more than what these two excellent development platforms provide.

A (very) brief list of the features of the two is also included, their similarities including SVN support and syntax checking.

This release, named you knew this was coming, adds full support for GtkBuilder and tooltips; in addition to a slew of bug fixes and overrides. [...] Coming up next: Akshat Gupta, our student for the Google Summer of Code program this year, will be working on cairo support for PHP-GTK.

The post also lists the changes to the packages included (and excluded) with this new release.