In this new press release Zend has announced the posting of the results from their "Zend Developer Pluse" survey - a survey taken of developers world-wide about their habits, preferences and desires.

Zend Technologies addresses [the question of how a new demand for a new generation of apps] in Zend Developer Pulse, a new survey series that takes the pulse of a vibrant community of developers from around the world. The company's first developer survey conducted in late November 2011 offers insights on emerging technology and career trends captured from 3,335 respondents. The findings are summarized in a report now available at [http://www.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-0112-EN.pdf].

The press release mentions some of the details from the survey including that 66% of developers will be working with mobile app development projcts, that next-generation UI deveopment scored high in skillsets, there was a strong interest in cloud development and that there's been a strong rise in the need for PHP development skills in the last year.

You can read the entire report here.

In an informal poll Lorna Mitchell recently asked fellow developers to weigh in on what static analysis tool they used on their code. She's posted the results to her blog today with one of the tools being a clear winner.

My interest was mostly because I'm working on a book chapter which includes some static analysis content, and there are a couple of these tools that I include in my own builds, but I don't do much with the output of them. However I didn't want to drop anything from the chapter if it was actually a valuable tool and I was just missing the point - pretty much all the tools got a good number of votes though, so I'll be covering all of the [options].

According to her results, the most used tool by developers is the PHP_CodeSniffer with the PHP Mess Detector and PHP Copy & Paste Detector tied for second place.

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted the results of a poll taken a little while back concerning what people thought was the best feature of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

After two weeks, we have closed the poll among the PHP community of Web Builder Zone to establish which are the most wanted features, which will influence development of applications on PHP 5.4. Hopefully this poll would also shape our focus in tutorials in the future - I personally plan to dedicate more time to the winning features.

Runners up included the removal of magic quotes and strict mode with the top three being (in this order) the upload progress patch, traits and the array improvements leading the pack. You can see the results here.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the results of their Ibuildings challenge where the developer had to create a script able to play "Four in a Line" based on an abstract Player class provided.

Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill.

There were three different categories - junior, medium and senior - and one winner for each:

• Junior: Xavier Van Herpe (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Medium: Piotr Mlocek (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Senior: Tomas Creemes (won the iPad)

They also include some observations about the code submitted to the competition including adherence to coding standards and overall performance.

On DZone.com today the results of their framework poll have been posted with some not-so-surprising results base on popularity and number of users in general.

A disclaimer: creating this poll was a bit of a catch-22, as I could not include all PHP frameworks (would have been a very long list) and had to make a selection based on popularity; of course that meant a guess by using Twitter and google results, but the ultimate popularity of the framework, at least in the audience of Web Builder Zone, would only be established by a poll. I thank you for the participation and the suggestions: we had more than one thousand votes, and this means we gathered responses from a statistically valid sample of the PHP community.

According to the results, the Zend Framework comes in at first place with Symfony and CodeIgniter coming in just behind. CakePHP was in fourth and "Other" in fifth. He points out that the top three frameworks all have something in common - they're all company-backed, but still derive a large part of their contributions from the community.

The results of this month's Bug Hunt Day for the Zend Framework are in and the Zend Developer Zone has posted about the champions and stats for the event.

In just 3 short days, contributors managed to resolve exactly 111 issues. Fitting though, if you think about it, since this is the 1.11 branch for Zend Framework: 111 issues, 1.11 branch release... I'd like to say we planned it that way, but alas, it was merely coincidental the way these numbers worked out.

The champion for this month's event is Ryan Mauger (Bittarman) who closed a huge 28 issues out of the 111 himself. He also points out the work that Ramon Henrique Ornelas has done in the past months to help things move towards the Zend Framework 2.0 mark.

According to this new post on the Web Builder Zone, the results of a poll taken about the best programming method for PHP these days is - by far - object-oriented programming.

After two weeks of gathering votes, the PHP paradigms poll is now closed. With 216 votes (73%), the winner paradigm in popularity is Object-Oriented Programming. The old procedural approach to PHP, which has given fame to Wordpress and Drupal, is coming to an end. Even Drupal 7 has an object-oriented database layer as a primary component, and this paradigm is by far the most diffused in the world for web sites and applications written in high level languages (different from C).

While the overwhelming amount of votes went to OOP, there were still a few for some of the other options including the second place winner - procedural programming. He also talks a bit about OOP's current place in the PHP ecosystem and how it has allowed for certain great tools to be developed, but how it also has a good ways to go in functionality.

Kevin Schroeder has been conducting an informal poll about asynchronous computing in PHP applications and has posted some of the results (as well as the poll for those that didn't get their votes in) to his blog today.

Tis the season for Zendcon. I am going to be giving a talk at Zendcon called "Do You Queue". It will be about doing asynchronous computing in PHP. In order for me to gather some data I posted a twitpoll poll. The response has been pretty good. However, there have also been several misunderstandings as well.

He points out a few comments on the poll that talk about asynchronous processing being included in the language and dismiss it as something that other technology already does. He agrees that threads shouldn't be in PHP because it would break on of PHP's strongest features - the Shared Nothing architecture. Want to share your opinion? Vote on the poll and be heard!

On his blog today Brian Moon takes a look at the mysqlnd driver that comes with PHP 5.3 by default and some strangeness he found when trying to fetch results.

I have spoken in the past (see my slides and interview: MySQL Tips and Tricks) about using mysql_unbuffered_query or using mysqli_query with the MYSQLI_USE_RESULT flag [...] So, my natural thought was that using MYSQLI_USE_RESULT with fetch_all would yield the most awesome performance ever. The data would not be buffered and it would get put into a PHP array in C instead of native code.

He had hoped that the fetch_all would cooperate with the MYSQL_USE_RESULT setting, but it seemed to only work with the MYSQLI_STORE_RESULT default. He even filed a bug on the matter which was marked bogus and then reopened. He hopes to show, based on test results, that the result could be much faster.

On the Zend Developer Zone Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the results for the latest Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days, an effort to correct as many issues with the Zend Framework.

This month's hunt was quite active, and we managed to close more than 70 issues, ranging over 19 components. I'm pleased to announce this month's top three contributors: Christian Albrecht, who closed 38(!) issues, Juozas Kaziukenas, who closed 17 issues, and Benjamin Eberlei, who closed 7 issues.

Matthew gets into a bit of detail about each of these top contributors and the total of 62 issues they worked and closed over the two days.