We already wrote about CodeBrowser 0.9 in August and after fixing a few minor bugs the Mayflower Open Source Labs Team is very happy to present PHP_CodeBrowser 1.0.0.

The PHP_CodeBrowser package allows quality assurance tools (like PHPUnit) to create enhanced output including syntax highlighting and colored error sections. It comes with some basic template, CSS, Javascript and image files as well as a plugin system to allow for custom handling of certain error types. You can install it from the pear.phpunit.de PEAR channel or you can check out the source on github.

CodeIgniter 2.0 is a major release, which means this has been a perfect chance for EllisLab to make major changes that effect compatibility. One example of a major change is that our Models now need to extend CI_Model instead of Model. That is an acceptable change for a major release, but think of the outcry if that was done after EllisLab had tagged v2.0.

He talks mentions the bugs currently in the tracker (quite a few) and how, despite those, the framework is still in a good, stable state. He also notes that EllisLab has to maintain both ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor on top of the framework so smaller patches and related functionality has just stemmed from that.

My advice to you, download the latest copy and have a play. If your application worked in v1.7.2 it will work in v2.0 and the upgrade is pretty simple.

For the last month or so I've been developing an app side-by-side with Kohana 3 and CodeIgniter 2 to see which framework fits my programming style better. Nothing terribly fancy; just a simple CMS. [...] In the end it comes down to framework stability for me. And in this case, CI wins, hands down. Don't get me wrong; Kohana is beautifully written and introduced me to a prime example of clean, well commented code.

She talks about some of what she was needing out of a framework and what ultimately lead her to pick CodeIgniter 2 as the tool for her and her development. She notes that, while Kohana is nicely written, they've had some consistency issues with backwards compatibility that have caused issues. She also mentions some of the unstable code that was added just to micro-optimize things when it wasn't needed.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

It's been stable for a while actually, but some people were hesitant to use it in production while it still had the beta designation. Well, no more, go forth and use it.

Future plans include the addition of memcached_dump and auto-ejection support. The memcached extension is a PHP library that allows your application to interface directly with a memcached server. Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

The Yii Framework builds upon learnings and findings from over 5 years of development of PRADO. If you already know PRADO you'll get the hold of Yii quite fast. The framework is already documented quite well in The Definitive Guide to Yii (a good place to start for beginners), in addition to complete class reference and an active forum where you can meet other developers.

There is also an extension repository and a few benchmarks to help you compare it to some of the other popular frameworks out there.

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.

The CakePHP team is gearing up to finally push out a stable 1.2 release! If you are following the trac timeline you can see that everybody is putting in huge amounts of work to fix bugs and get everything stable.

He suggests a few ways to get involved in helping to push this release out the door like writing test cases, showing how to replicate bugs and help out the documentation team with their efforts to keep the manual up to date.

About the Zend Framework 1.0.4 release:

It is our pleasure to announce the release of Zend Framework 1.0.4! You can download this new mini-release now from the Zend Framework download site. With this mini-release we bid a fond farewell to the 1.0 branch as we move on to the 1.5 release.

And about the Release Candidate:

This obviously marks a very important step towards a high-quality, thoroughly tested 1.5 GA release. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release in any way: with patches/check ins, documentation/translations, and bug reports.

You can grab this new Candidate from the download site as well.