This week's latest PHPBarnstormer has been published (issue #8). In this latest issue of PHPBarnstormer is out. In Issue #8, Aaron peers at the PHP 5 hosting space, the buzz around PHP-GTK, the math functions in PHP, and the "big things" that happend at Zend. Also get a heads up on the latest PEAR and PECL news and releases. The package in focus this week is XML_Serializer - the Swiss-army knife for reading and writing XML files.

Besides the items mentioned above, this week's edition includes PEAR and PECL news such as the two packages proposed (Sqlite_Tools and Text_CAPTCHA) and numerous releases including: pdflib-2.0.1 (stable), HTTP_Header-1.0.0 (stable), memcache-1.2 (stable), and HTTP_Download-0.9.0 (beta).

The "Package in focus" this week is the XML_Serializer - the "Swiss-army knife for reading and writing XML files. Creates XML files from data structures and vice versa". If you've ever used the PHP functions serialize and unserialize, you'll see that XML_Serializer does roughly the same thing, except that instead of using the serialized array that the serialize function uses, it stores the data in an XML file.