Its about that time again and David Coallier has pointed it out - the Google Summer of Code is not far off and PHP will be right in the middle again!

Once again we are happy to announce that PHP will be taking part in the Google Summer of Code. Already with a list of more than interesting and intelligent ideas, we are looking to get more ideas. This of course means that PEAR Developers, PECL Developers and PHP(Core) Developers now have to cook some ideas up and submit them to the GSoC 2009 PHP Wiki so we can have more good ideas for students to apply to!

There's already a few things about this year's GSoC that have been posted - the page on the PHP.net wiki, a mailing list announcement on the PEAR dev list and, of course, the official GSoC page.

In a new post to the blog at deasil.com, they talk about some of the lessons they see that can be learned from PHP and how it works/is packaged up.

PHP, though, came along with a breakthrough idea - mod_php was an everything in one install. Unlike mod_perl, mod_php gave you a programming language, templating language and extension all in one.

He advocates the PHP language developer's decisions to include everything into the core of the language which (while maybe not the best of decisions) has made PHP into one of the most practical development languages and has helped to make it one of the most popular and widely used languages on the web.

Padraic Brady has posted some of his comments on the newly included Zend_Layout and Zend_View_Enhanced components for the Zend_Framework:

These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View.

Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.

He thanks the developers (Matthew and Ralph) and notes that the inclusion of these two components is one of the largest advancements of the display layer for the Framework in a while.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney notes today that the Zend_View_Enhanced and Zend_Layout components for the Zend Framework have officially joined the core.

With these two components, you can now create some truly complex views for your application with relative ease. [...] By having these as a standard part of the library, there are now standard ways to perform these tasks -- meaning consistency between applications.

He gives some brief examples of the use of the two newly included components: echoing out a DOCTYPE, adding a script to be loaded in the header and a more complex layout with a header, meta data, content and a footer section.

Bill Staples has pointed out a tutorial from Dennis Chung about setting up Wordpress on an IIS7 server with MySQL on the Windows Server 2008 Server Core.

Wow. Take Windows Server 2008 Server Core + PHP + IIS7 + MySQL + WordPress, mix them together, will they blend well and work out as a nice concoction? Matty challenged me to this blend, and guess what, we have a powerful cocktail to offer after all!

He breaks the tutorial up into serveral topics like:

• the hardware used
• the use of virtualization in the setup
• setting up Windows Server Core on the network
• setting up FastCGI and PHP on the IIS server
• loading MySQL onto the server
• installing and configuring Wordpress

Stefan Esser points out a new patch today - CORE GRASP - from the Core Security Technologies group that provides taint support surrounding the mysql_query function.

Their implementation adds a tainted or not flag for every byte so that it is possible on invocation of mysql_query() to determine any kind of injection.

Unfortunately, Stefan also mentions two big issues it might have from the get-go: the overhead for the memory needed can slow things down and an incorrect parsing in their query handler could lead to injection attacks.

Mike Wallner talks today about a much deliberated topic in the community currently - the inclusion of the phar extension into the core distribution of PHP and how, because of not having a good addition process, things will get a little nuts:

How many people are really reading through all mails of 100+ message threads? It's going to be a chaos. Always. Once a developer has got his new, shiny and soon-to-be-world-dominating extension into the core, he'll be a even stronger advocate of the "no-new-extensions" camp. Not to disrespect any work, but this is pure rivalism, masculine - really!

When asked it the phar extension will make it into the core, Mike usually responds with "Never" simply because of the issues surrounding the personal feelings of those that would be involved with the merge.

The Zend Framework team has officially released the latest version of the framework - hopefully the first and last beta before the stable release - Beta 0.9.0.

We're pleased to announce Zend Framework Beta Release 0.9.0. This is the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. This marks a new milestone for the Framework project, because with the status of Beta, we are establishing the feature set for Zend Framework 1.0, and we are adopting a commitment to backward-compatibility and interface stability.

Updates in this release include three new components moved into the core (Zend_Translate, Zend_Auth, and Zend_Db_Adapter using mysqli) as well as improvements to things like the MVC output buffering, Zend_Mail features, the inclusion of the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, Zend_Service_Delicious and Zend_Service_Simpy and much more. Check out the full release announcement for more and the development wiki for where things are headed.

Chris Hartjes has a note posted today about the move of his component project for the Zend Framework into its core grouping of components - Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler.

It finally made it! After some major reworking of the unit tests (at 86% coverage, with 3 more tests to come after the freeze is up) and Derek busting his butt to get the documentation done, Darby Fenton emailed me to tell me that he's moved our component for connecting to the web services being offered by Audioscrobbler (and that powers Last.fm out of the incubator and into the core.

You can get more information on what the component can do and how to use it from its page over on the Zend Framework wiki.

Derick Rethans has posted his summary of the happenings in the world of PHP as experienced through his eyes:

It's the end of the year again, and that means that I (once again) spent way too much time writing this wrap up of PHP in 2006. In this, the fifth iteration of my annual PHP Look Back, we'll explore the happenings of the PHP world in 2006.

He mentions things like the various PHP releases over the year (especially the release of 5.2), discussions and debates over some of the core functionality of PHP (variables, syntax, etc), actions of the PDM, lots of Unicode talk, and many, many suggestions for functionality to be added to the core.

Check out the full (lengthy) look back here on his website.