There's three new things from Zend.com this morning - a new weekly summary, a tutorial about using NuSOAP and web services, and a new Code Gallery Spotlight highlighting "Dynamic Options with Bitwise Operators".

First off, there's the latest Weekly Summary posted, covering some of the changes and updates in the past week. Some of the more interesting points covered: the new PHP 4.2.3 release, the two PHP conferences being held (including PHPCon 2002), and a fun new patch that will allow you to just do a --configure-all if you want all of the extensions in the source tree enabled.

Also posted this morning is this new tutorial about using PHP with NuSOAP to work with web services and creating them. The Simple Object Access Protocol is a great tool for connecting sites and machines, and this tutorial shows you how - they step you through some sample requests and show you some simple client/server scripts that you can use to talk back and forth between machines. Web services are just now reaching the really useful point, and SOAP is a very useful protocol for them.

And, finally, just to round off the group from Zend, there is a new Code Gallery Spotlight that talks about storing options with "bitwise operators". For those that don't have a clue what I'm talking about,
Bitwise Operators allow you to manipulate integers at the bit level. Using bitwise operators, you can determine if a particular bit is set (to “on”), turn a bit “on” or “off”, compare bits in two integers, or shift the bits left or right.
They will save you loads of time and space in a database since you don't have to have a field that stores a "on or off" value in it, you can just set the bits on values already in the database.