In this new post to his blog Sean Coates talks about PHP as a templating language and why he (and Gimmebar) have decided to go another, more frontend-based direction.

For many years, I was a supporter of using PHP as a templating language to render HTML. However, I really don't buy into the idea of adding an additional abstraction layer on top of PHP, such as Smarty (and many others). In the past year or so, I've come to the realization that even PHP itself is no longer ideally suited to function as the templating engine of current web applications - at least not as the primary templating engine for such apps.

His reasoning is pretty simple - more and more web applications are becoming less and less server-driven. When building applications (and APIs) you don't know how the data will be consumed, so your frontend has to be agnostic. So, what's his current alternative of choice? The Mustache templating framework provides a simple way to create reusable templates (along with the compatible Handlebars Javascript library).

On the PHPClasses.org site today they've posted their latest episode of the "Lately in PHP" Podcast, "Will it ever Matter if PHP Sucks?"

Once in a while we see fans of other languages writing long articles on why PHP sucks and you should not use it. But will that ever matter? That is one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 23 of the Lately in PHP podcast, for the first time also recorded in video using Google Hangouts On Air.

They also talk about some of the recent proposals for PHP itself and the buzz surrounding the "HTTP 2.0" protocol that's been proposed. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. Since they used the Google Hangouts to record the session, you can also watch the video.

Court Ewing has a new post to his blog describing some of the most common cryptic errors that you might come across in your day-to-day development.

If you've been programming for awhile, then you've probably experienced your fair share of cryptic error messages. It's understandable that building in detailed error messages that are clear to even novice developers is not always a high priority for programming languages when there are so many other features to create and issues to address. The PHP language has decent error messages, but it is by no means an exception to this rule.

The three errors he covers are probably familiar to anyone that's been working with PHP for any length of time:

• Fatal error: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM
• Fatal error: Can't use function return value in write context
• Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

The PHP project has officially released the latest versions of the language - PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1. These releases focuses on improving the stability of the current PHP branches with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related. [...] For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1, see the ChangeLog. For source downloads please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. All users of PHP are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.11 or PHP 5.4.1.

Several bugs were fixed in both releases including issues with validation of the name of the uploaded file, adding open_basedir checks to readline_write_history/readline_read_history, and the addition of debug info handler to DOM objects.

In what's sure to be a "flame bait" kind of post, Jani Hartikainen has posted five reasons PHP is better than Node.js - some simple one-liners and others a bit more complicated.

All hail Node.js! Boo PHP! Except there are various things where PHP is better than Node…

His five reasons are:

• Easier to find hosting
• It's easier to get started with PHP
• If your PHP code breaks, it doesn't bring your whole server down
• PHP processes are short lived
• Bigger standard library

There's a few comments on the post already, one noting that some of the points could be turned around to make PHP fall more on the "bad" side.

Engine Yard has released the audio from a recent (webcast) panel discussion they did about the Future of PHP with members of the PHP community (a part of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series).

Elizabeth Naramore talks with David Soria Parra, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Stas Malyshev for a panel discussion about Internals. Our panel of experts will share their thoughts and predictions about the existing PHP landscape, and what is to come.

It's about 30 minutes long and they talk about PHP 5.4, compiling PHP, performance issues, the slow rate of adoption in newer releases, memory usage and some of the general strengths and weaknesses of the language. Elizabeth also asks each person on the panel about things they've each seen done wrong on the project and something they'd like to see in its future.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

In a new post to his blog Pádraic Brady wonders if PHP should be more equated to innocent villagefolk or a pillagin' pirate:

What PHP excels at is tireless consumption. Marathon races make one hungry and we can't help but notice the feasts being exposed by Rubyland or Pythonville as they do their best to sprint past us. Without that thieving spirit, PHP would long since have entered obscurity as a quaint HTML oriented scripting language used by college students to build cheap websites with flashing text and under construction GIFs. [...] Our strength lies in our ability to connect the dots several hundred times over to the point where the best dot connector gains a critical mass of adoption.

He talks about how most PHP developers seem to like doing things the hard way - reinventing the wheel, overstate personal preferences to the point of argument, ignoring best practices and promoting the bad ones.

He even suggests a possible new creed for PHP developers:

What we really need is a new PHP motto. Something deep and meaningful that exposes PHP's true nature. I was thinking "Rob 'em blind, matie!" would be a good one but I remembered that we need to cater for the Enterprise audience. Suggestions welcome.

On the Oracle Technology Network today there's a new article from Rasmus Lerdorf about the current release of the language (PHP 5.4) and what he sees as the future for PHP.

Almost exactly eight years ago I wrote an article for the Oracle Technology Network called, "Do You PHP?". In that article, I talked about PHP's stubborn, function-over-form approach to solving the "Web problem" and the fight to keep things simple. We were getting close to releasing PHP 5.0 at the time. Now here we are almost a decade later with a shiny new PHP 5.4.0 release, and while much has happened during that time, there are also many things that haven't changed at all.

The first talks about what's the same - the ecosystem surrounding the language and the strength of the LAMP stack that PHP helped to "found". He mentions some of the up-and-comers that are alternatives to this traditional setup and some of the extensions that have been added to improve PHP's functionality (DateTime, PDO, JSON support). He talks about other improvements in the language including:

• Better memory management
• Traits
• Short Array Syntax
• Closure binding
• Built-in webserver
• Native session handler interface
• Removal of register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode

He briefly looks ahead at "what's next" for the language and points to the "internals" mailing list and the PHP wiki

On Reddit.com there's a long thread with responses to the question "What are some genuine criticisms of PHP?" with opinions ranging from small issues (like syntax) out to more community-related topics.

PHP tends to get a lot of flak, but mostly it is for something that isn't really the fault of PHP. Things like "there is so much bad PHP code out there" may be true but you can write bad code in any language. You shouldn't be mixing PHP, SQL and HTML, and you should be escaping/parameterizing variables for queries. (Thankfully this is less prevalent nowadays.) So do many PHP criticisms actually hold true today, now we have namespaces and we have buried crap like magic quotes at the bottom of the ocean?

Other comments cover things like

• PHP's namespace implementation
• poor web services support
• Less code audits, more "roll-your-own fever"
• Function naming and parameter order
• weak OOP functionality

Check out the full post for lots more opinions and add yours too!

Nikita Popov has posted the fourth part of the "PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers" series he and Anthony Ferrara have been posting. In this latest article in the series, Nikita looks specifically at PHP's array implementation and how it's handed "behind the scenes".

Welcome back to the fourth part of the "PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers" series, in which we'll cover how PHP arrays are internally represented and used throughout the code base.

He starts with an obvious foundation: "everything's a hash table" (even properties, classes and yes, arrays). He describes what a hash table is and talks about two of the most commonly used versions of it in the PHP source - HashTable and Bucket. He gets into their usage a bit and compares this to the corresponding PHP code that uses a standard array.