In this latest post from the PHPClasses.org blog, Manuel Lemos looks at a class designed specifically for working with Arabic data in PHP - Ar-PHP - and interviews its lead developer, Khaled Al-Shamaa.

Arabic is a language spoken in many countries. The number of PHP developers from countries that use the Arabic language has been growing a lot. Currently it represents almost 2% of the users that access the PHPClasses site. The Arabic language writing direction is from right to left. It requires the use of a non-Latin character set. These facts raise special challenges to developers willing to build sites with Arabic text. Khaled Al-Shamaa, a PHP developer from Syria has written a library of classes named Ar-PHP. It address many of the challenges of building Arabic sites in PHP.

They talk about who Khaled is, look at a general overview of the project, what kinds of things are in the future for the library and what kind of difference PHP6 will make.