In this new post to his blog Stoimen Popov talks about calling the "destructor" method of an object and why doing it directly could lead to some issues - like not actually destroying the object before the script ends.

At the end of the script the interpreter frees the memory. Actually every object has a built-in destructor, just like it has built-in constructor. So even we don't define it explicitly, the object has its destructor. Usually this destructor is executed at the end of the script, or whenever the object isn't needed anymore. This can happen, for instance, at the end of a function body. Now if we call the destructor explicitly, which as I said I've seen many times, here's what happen. As you can see calling the destructor explicitly doesn't destroy the object. So the question is...how to destroy an object before the script stops?

He points out that one way to "destroy" an object is to null it out and remove the structure from memory. This is tricky, though, because a clone of the object will still exist in memory, just not the original.

Fabien Potencier has made an announcement on the Symfony Blog today about all the availability of previous Symfony versions on github.

symfony1 is well and alive and many developers are now using it for projects hosted on Git. But as the official symfony 1 repository is hosted on Subversion, it's not always easy to get things versioned easily. As of today, this becomes much more easier. If you are using Git and symfony1, you can now use the official symfony1 Git clone.

There are branches for each of the major 1.x releases as well as tags for some of the minor releases. You can, of course, still access the latest packages directly via the symfony website.

From the Straw Dogs blog there's a recent post looking at some of the PHP frameworks out there have the same kind of philosophy behind them as the Sinatra framework for Ruby - a small, light framework that's easy to use.

I'm currently looking for a good PHP framework to do a new project. I recently used Kohana 3 at on a project for a client but I needed something lighter and having used Sinatra and Padrino previously but needing it PHP based I did the next natural step - searched for PHP Sinatra clones.

There's four frameworks that made the list - all in varying states of development:

• Limonade
• Fat Free Framework
• Slim
• Fitzgerald

In a new post to his blog William shows you how to create a Popurls clone with the powerful combination of PHP and jQuery. Popurls is an aggregation site with some of the latest news and happenings from all around the web.

Since I have a crazy workload right now, I feel this is the perfect time to write a quick n' dirty tutorial on how to build your very own Popurls. Impress your friends and/or boss with a nifty, hand made news aggregator. Yes, very buzz word friendly.

He uses the SimplePie library to pull in the information from various feeds including Digg.com, Reddit.com, Wired's news feed and Engadget. He shows how to use regular expressions to extract information from the feeds (if they're uncooperative), a bit of PHP to work around potentially empty fields and the full jQuery/HTML/CSS you'll need to make it look more like this

New on DevShed today is the latest article in their "magic functions" series. This time they focus on the "clone" method to create exact copies of current objects.

In this fifth part of a seven-part tutorial on magic functions, we'll briefly review the sleep and wakeup functions, and then tackle the clone function. [...] So, with that goal in mind, in this fifth part of the series I'm going to take a closer look at the "__clone()" method, which as its name suggests, is called behind the scenes when using the "clone" PHP keyword.

Their example code adds on to the previous examples using "__get" and "__set" and adds in a method to catch the cloning of an object. It only outputs a string ("Cloning user object") when its called, but it lets you get the idea.

On the SitePoint Web Tech blog Raena Jackson-Armitage has a recent post on a few tools that you can use to mimic some of the functionality Twitter offers (three of them) with applications that already exist.

If you're anything like me, you've already wondered how easy it would be to make your own'"perhaps you'd like to set up a microblog for you and your colleagues to share links and have discussions. [...] Today we'll look at three new solutions that are easy to set up, have reasonably modest hosting requirements, and even include some features that blow Twitter out of the water.

They suggest three tools:

• the P2 plugin for WordPress
• the Motion plugin for Movable Type
• Laconica (the platform that Identica runs on, a full Twitter clone with other added features)

Each of these comes with a description of installation, features offered and use.

Raphael Stolt has another post dealing with the Phing (PHP-based) build tool. This time he talks about making ad hoc tasks inside of your build scripts.

Sometimes there are build scenarios where you'll badly need a functionality, like adding a MD5 checksum file to a given project, that isn't provided neither by the available Phing core nor the optional tasks. [...] The following post will try to outline how to define and use these inline tasks, by sketching an ad hoc task that enables the build orchestra to clone Git repositories from GitHub during a hypothetical workbench setup.

He creates an example task - running a "clone" command via github - complete with the code for both sides of the feature; the PHP code to create the task and how to use it in your build file.

On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico points out a Django templating language clone for PHP - Calypso.

Calypso is a full clone of the Django Template Language that helps developers separates the presentational and logic concerns of the application. It offers template inheritance, pluggable tags and filters, and can be easily integrated into the Zend Framework

The most powerful part of the Calypso system is the template inheritance. It allows you to build up a skeleton of templates that can be used for the entire site with blocks and areas that any other part of the application can easily override.

According to the PHP::Impact blog, the PHP-based replacement for Twitter has finally arrived - identi.ca.

Identi.ca is a microblogging service. Users post short (140 character) notices which are broadcast to their friends and fans using the Web, RSS, or instant messages. It runs on the Free Software Laconica tool.

If you'd like to give it a shot you can register for an account of your own and start posting. It also supports OpenID authentication.

Hasin Hayder has posted part two of his series on making a FriendFeed clone in PHP (here's part one).

Following the first installment in this series, here is the second part. In this part I will focus mainly on Bookmarking and News services supported by FriendFeed .

He points out some of the major bookmarking sites and the URLs for their interfaces for their users (like del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon and news services like digg and reddit).