On the Ibuildings blog, Ian Barber has a reminder to PHP developers out there used to their servers "just working" because of the popularity of LAMP. He recommends digging a little deeper to the "behind the scenes" of how the server is configured.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.

As this post over on APress' Inside Open Source blog today, there's a discussion that's been going on over on the php-dev mailing list about namespaces in PHP6.

I find both sides of the argument quite compelling, and while FWIW I'm in favor of including them in the next release, I'm somewhat indifferent to the matter. According to one of the very latest messages in the thread, Zeev Suraski confirms they simplistic support will likely be enabled.

That's Jason Gilmore talking there, and he goes on to reinforce something Rasmus Lerdorf has said about namespaces in the past - they'll implement them when they find the right way (in the PHP spirit) to do it.