In the latest from Zend this week, they have posted their latest PHP weekly summary covering the previous week's activities.

Included in this week's items are topics such as modifications and updates to the SimpleXML functionality of PHP5, changes to Netware's portion of PHP5 (yet to be approved for 5.0.0), and the suggestion of the removal of gpc_order php.ini directive (due to numerous issues caused by it).

The largest mention, however, concerns the introduction of the SPL extension as default in PHP 5. For those that are unsure how this can help, here's some information.

This is an extension that aims to implement some efficient data access interfaces and classes. There are special SPL interfaces that provides the ability to hook into foreach and array reading/writng. By inheriting these interfaces, instances of the resulting classes can be iterated using the foreach construct or use array read write notation.

Basically, it provides an interface through which you can access arrays and iterate through them in a standardized way. This would mean not only cleaner code and make things easier to maintain, but would also allow for future updates to array handling to be as simple as updating your SPL.