A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:

Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.

On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").

You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode 34 of their PHP Abstract podcast series from Manuel Lemos covering the abstraction of steams in a PHP application.

Today's special guest is Manuel Lemos of phpclasses.org Manuel is from Portugal and currently lives in Brazil where he works full-time on PHPClasses.org that he created in 1999. Today, Maunel is going to talk to us about Streams Abstraction.

Grab it in one of the usual three ways - listen on the page, download the mp3 or subscribe to feed for the show. Also, be sure to check out some of the other episodes listed at the bottom of the post for lots of other great content.

On the Zend Developer Zone, jonwage has posted about an ORM (Object-Relational mapping) he came across that can help abstract out your interface with your backend database - Doctrine.

One of its key features is the ability to optionally write database queries in an OO (object oriented) SQL-dialect called DQL inspired by Hibernates HQL. This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains a maximum of flexibility without requiring needless code duplication.

The project's page gives the full details on the features it offers and has links to the latest downloads so you can try it out for yourself. There's even a blog you can subscribe to to keep up to date.

Wez Furlong posted a request for comments to the php.internals and php.pdo mailing lists yesterday about a new ly proposed update to the current PDO functionality - PDO 2. He just wants to clear up a few things...

It became apparent over the past year or so that PDO has been a good and valuable addition to PHP. [...] We believe that having direct involvement from the data access providers would be most effective, which is why we set out to try and get them on board.

There were three steps they would need to make to push things to version two (documentation, define scope/direction and organize data provider integration methods) and the proposal that has caused a huge stir in the community - the idea of requiring a CLA contributors would need to sign.

Comments to this point from the community include:

• Richard Thomas
• Antony Dovgal
• some of Wez's own comments
• Mike Willbanks
• Christopher Jones
• Lukas Smith
• Paul Jones
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• Jay Pipes
• Derick Rethans
• Marco Tabini
• Kristian Kohntopp
• Some PDO humor from David Coallier and Travis Swicegood
• Marcus Borger (and his part two)
• Richard Heyes
• Till's blog entry
• Say No to the CLA