As is mentioned in this new post to DZone.com, one of the features of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release, including things like traits and array dereferencing support, will also have an interesting new feature - a built-in simple web server.

Yet another new feature to look forward to in PHP 5.4.0 - the CLI SAPI will now provide a built-in web server which is geared toward developmental purposes. It shouldn't be used in production right now.

The PHP manual has been updated with the latest on this upcoming feature:

URI requests are served from the current working directory where PHP was started, unless the -t option is used to specify an explicit document root. [...] If a PHP file is given on the command line when the web server is started it is treated as a "router" script for the web server. The script is run at the start of each HTTP request. If this script returns FALSE, then the requested resource is returned as-is. Otherwise the script's output is returned to the browser.

The PHP 5.4.x series is still in beta as of the time of this post - you can download the beta1 on the downloads section of the PHP site (or the Windows binaries).

Christian Stocker has a quick new post on the Liip blog today about an easy way to test the PHP 5.4 beta on your OS X-based platform with a simple package install and symlink.

Since the first beta of the next major release of PHP was released a few days ago, I thought we could provide packages for people who'd like to test it and see if there software is still running. And make adjustments or report bugs, if it doesn't. Complaining after the official stable release was made is usually too late, so testing your software against beta releases is very important. For your project and for PHP.

The install involves grabbing their package from the Liip server and calling the "packager.py" executable to make the version swap. You can go back to the pre-installed PHP5 version anytime by updating the symlink back. If you want more information on the package (or to report bugs) you can find the project over in github.

Chris Jones has posted a quick note to his blog today about some new PHP packages that are available from Oracle of 5.3.8 (RPM) with one of the latest OCI8 extensions already included.

I've built PHP 5.3.8 RPM packages with various common extensions (and the latest OCI8 1.4.6) for Linux x64. They are downloadable at oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These binaries might be useful for quick testing. They are unsupported.

He points to packages on the ULN site if you're looking for something a bit more stable. The OCI 1.4.6 version of the extension includes a few new features but was mostly a test suite update.

New on DevShed.com today is a tutorial helping you optimize your file downloading for your web application and provide a way to give users dynamic links to files instead of direct ones.

The true path to the downloadable content can be revealed easily and is not protected, allowing users to bypass web forms and download the content directly using a browser. [...] The Solution: A Secure and Efficient PHP Download Script

This tutorial is actually an update of their previous tutorial looking at a similar subject, with a few differences. Their code provides a way to limit the files a user can download, the number of times they can download it and a script to read the file and push it to the user without them ever knowing the path.

On the PHP.net site today there's an announcement about the release of the PHP 5.4 alpha1, the first version of the upcoming 5.4 release.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first PHP 5.4 alpha release. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Read the NEWS file for a complete list of changes. [...] This alpha release exists to encourage users to identify bugs, and to ensure that all new features and backward compatibility breaks are evaluated and documented before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Please report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

They remind the development community that this is an alpha release and is not meant to be used in production. Changes in this release include traits, array dereferencing, DTrace support, the removal of several ini options and a few session-related functions.

Dave Gardner has put together a post about some work he did with the Joind.in API (an event feedback site) to apply collective intelligence to the results of the PHP UK Conference.

The term "collective intelligence" refers to intelligence that emerges from the collaboration of a group. In this case, we can leverage the data within joind.in and make "intelligent" recommendations. This post looks at building a simple recommendation engine using the data from joind.in. You can download the entire source code here (gzipped) or view via PasteBin here and try it out for yourself.

His code connects to the Joind.in API and fetches the event's talk information and the comments for each. His "calculatePearson" function then takes in two users and the set of ratings to figure out how similar their preferences are. There's also a bit of code that approaches it from a different angle - providing recommendations for users based on their own comments.

Yesterday saw the release of the two latest versions of PHP in both the 5.2.x and 5.3.x series - 5.2.15 and 5.3.4. Here's a bit from each release announcement.

For 5.2.15:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.15. This release marks the end of support for PHP 5.2. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3. This release focuses on improving the security and stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with a small number, of predominately security fixes.

For 5.3.4:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.4. This is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes.

For full details you can the the Changelogs for each release - 5.3.4 and 5.2.15. As always, you can download these latest versions from the main PHP site or your favorite local mirror.

The folks over at php|architect have created a white paper detailing some of their experiences with using the SQL Server Driver (v2.0) with PHP and made it available for download.

A while back, our friends at Microsoft asked us to write a whitepaper on how to use Microsoft SQL Server from PHP through their brand-new SQL Server Driver 2.0, which you may have noticed tucked away in a corner of the download package for our September 2010 issue. Now that we've had a chance to collect feedback and fix a few bugs here and there, we thought it'd be good to make it available to anyone - you can find it here in PDF format.

Topics covered in the paper include installing and configuring the SQL Server driver, accessing the database with PHP, understanding joins, working with SQL Azure and a bit on migrating from a MySQL database.

Steponas Kazakevicius has written up a new tutorial about file downloading and, more specifically, making an download tool that can handle interruptions in mid-stream (elegantly).

Have you ever been to a website that offers downloads of stuff? And while you are waiting for the download, there are lots of ads around? Sure you have. I have too. The last day I was downloading stuff. An idea came to my head. Was there a site which required to stay and watch the ads while you are downloading? Didn't see one. Is that technically possible? Sure. I wanted to show how. So I made a small web app for that.

His application (live demo or download available) submits the user upload in the background so that, if the user decides to cancel it, they can at any time and move on immediately.

In a new post to his blog Nick Belhomme takes a look at namespaces in PHP 5.3 - what they are and how to use them (complete with code snippets of a small sample project).

With PHP5.3.3 recently released I really feel it is time that php developers are taking namespaces seriously. If you don't I guarantee you will be out of a job within five years. Namespaces are a fundamental part of the future of PHP.

He also makes his sample project available for download so you can follow along a bit better. He shows how to create a namespace, how to use them in both simple and more complex examples.