Florin Patan has posted about what he calls the next big thing in PHP - his observations of the current state of the language/community and what could be coming down the road.

What's the next big thing in PHP? Or more accurately, how do you get to wish/want for a next big thing in PHP? PHP currently is seen as a jack of all trades, master none by most of people outside of PHP world and it's starting to look the same way for people who are using it as well. How did we got there?

He spends a lot of the post talking about the future of PHP, though - what could be coming along with a PHP 6 release. He suggests that, with the way things are going, PHP could not be around too much longer if something dosen't change. He also makes several suggestions to the core PHP developers about what they could do to help the situation including strong typed variables, a "smarter parser" and a poll for PHP.net asking the users what they want in the language.

This should be the next big thing in PHP. Collaboration and better community interface for both worlds, users and devs. Help us help you on PHP6, help us making a better world for everyone using PHP.

PHP 5 has been presented as a revolution, a lot of new features have been added and a lot of projects have been made. But only a small group of hosters seem interested in supporting PHP 5 on their web servers. It is not so useful to have a beautiful programming language to use if we can't apply it to production environments.

We MUST use PHP 5 to help it growing until it become the standard...

PHP5 has seen a pretty slow adoption rate so far, but according to some statistics, its usage has been picking up lately - even among hosting providers.

Now that PHP 5 is becoming more and more prevalent over its predecessors, some really good books that cover PHP need revisions. Nowhere is this more true than with XML-related topics, where PHP 5 has a completely different way of working with XML - and, in fact, the mechanisms from PHP 4 will no longer work.

In this article, we'll be looking at one way to build and parse an XML tree using the new methods in PHP 5.

They look at a generic XML document they'll use to test and move quickly into a way to create it using the DOM functionality in PHP. From there, they use a simple ten-line script to parse it and echo it back out...