In a recent post to his blog Brandon Savage evaluates Propel (ORM) to see what it has to offer him and his applications.

I've liked Propel ever since I started working with it in the middle of last year; I personally find it easier and more fun to use than Doctrine or other ORMs available today. I was excited to see recently that Propel's development team had released Propel 1.5 as a beta, with a launch of the new features to come soon.

He points out two of the newer features that he particularly likes - collections and on-demand hydration and model queries. The first lets you hydrate the results fetched as you need them instead of all at once and the second does away with some of the issues that came up with making Criteria objects. You can find out more about these and other new features on the Propel "What's New" page.

Adam Gotterer has written up a tutorial with his process behind creating an object collection manager with PHP's built-in SPL functionality.

The purpose of a collection is to store objects in an organized manner with specific access rules. We are going to build a collection class using the Standard PHP Library (SPL). Our final product will be capable of iterating, counting and access to objects via array. If you are not familiar with SPL you can find some additional information on the PHP SPL manual site. Unfortunately the manual is somewhat lacking.

He creates an object that implements the ArrayAccess, Countable and Iterator objects to create a "Collection" class to hold his multiple objects inside an"objects" array. He includes some code to test the class and the output as a result.

Gilang Chandrasa has put together a list of PHP libraries the Komunitasweb.com site recommends using in your applications.

Having a collection of php libraries in one places will help you get your job done faster. It help me, so I share my list. I'll keep update the list with more libraries.

Among those in the list are libraries like PEAR's Services_JSON, PHPUnit, My_Twitter, SimplePie and SwiftMailer.

John Mertic has put together a what's new list in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release:

PHP V5.3 is set to be released by the end of 2008, and many of the new features in this release have been in the planning stages for a few years. Originally touted as "PHP V6 without native Unicode support," PHP V5.3 has been developed into a feature-rich upgrade to the PHP V5 line. [...] In this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series, we'll look at these new V5.3 features, and see how they are used and how they can be used in your Web application.

In this first part of the series he talks about:

• Improved static method and member handling
• The _callStatic() magic method
• Dynamic static calls
• Late static binding
• Standard PHP Library
• Circular garbage collection

On the CodeUtopia blog Jani Hartikainen has posted some thoughts on generic collections in PHP and a class he's created to try to introduce them to the language.

Strictly typed languages usually use "generic" collection classes instead of arrays. They are kind of like PHP arrays which the programmer can tell which type of items to accept. This is of course only natural when you don't have dynamic typing, but it can also be useful for avoiding programming errors, so I thought I'd try making a basic generic collection class in PHP...

He shows how ti works with a simple code example - creating a new collection type (a string) and pushing the data into it. Calling the add() method on the string throws an exception because of the data type defined. You can grab the code from his svn repository.

DevShed has posted the fourth part of their series looking at working with the DOM functionality of PHP5, this time with a focus on working with multiple document nodes inside of an XML document.

It's time to learn a few other methods included with the DOM XML extension. Based upon this premise, in this fourth tutorial I'm going to show you how to get access to multiple nodes of an XML document, either for internal processing or simply for echoing to the browser.

They show you how to grab the collection of nodes to work with and how to grab data from an XML text file with load() and loadXML().

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.

I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.

He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...

Vlado (on Dikini.net) has updated his patterns pages with several more new methods, brining the total up to around 20 different types.

I guess I'm on the down form my design pattern tantrum hit. I updated the collection so it now has about 20 of them, not all can be considered "officially" design patterns, but to be honest I don't really care. I'm very well aware that I ignore the existance of boundaries between design patterns, idioms, techniques, etc.

The collection now includes:

• Control abstraction
• Coroutines (generator based)
• Generator (iterator protocol based)
• Nested scope
• Partial Evaluation

...and many more.

On DevShed today, there's this new tutorial aimed at more advanced PHP developers concerning how to simulate events in PHP5.

PHP has the drawback of not supporting events. Fortunately, a basic structure can be built to support events in PHP 5. This article tackles that problem with some proof of concept code.

It seemed reasonable to me that some sort of basic structure could be established to support events in PHP 5, so I set out to whip something up as quickly as possible as a proof of concept. The contents of this article are the work of roughly one programming hour and surely stand to be improved upon, but the basic idea is this: instantiate an object and attach event handlers; the handlers will be executed when the events they are associated with are raised.

They look first at how to create a simple object to store the information in and a "collection" class to manage those objects. They move on to the creation of the event handler class and a "collection" class for handling those as well. Finally, they get to the combination of the above items - a class that does an eval on the inputted string and creates an associative array.