On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted about the roadmap to a final release for the Symfony2 version of the popular framework including some of the things that will and will not change after the release.

We are now ready to release Symfony 2.0 final. As we have made some significant changes in the last couple of weeks, we are publishing another release candidate (RC5) today and we will wait for a week before releasing Symfony 2.0 final on Thursday 28th.

The upgrade to Symfony2 is just a few commands away and there's a large list of components that are set and will not be changed moving forward including the DependencyInjection, Finder, Locale, Routing and Validator.

Symfony 2.1 will be the first release with all the components with a public stable API. And for components that already have a public API in 2.0, 2.1 will be the occasion to add even more classes and methods to it.

As a reminder, today is the last day to get in talk proposals for next year's php|tek conference:

Today is the last day of the Call for Papers for our upcoming php|tek 2009 conference, which will take place in Chicago between May 19 and 22nd. Don't forget to send in your proposals before it's too late!

You can get more information about submitting a talk from this page on the conference website as well as where to send the proposals and what kind of speaker compensation package they have to offer.

The PHP group has officially announced the availability of the final release of the PHP4 series for the language - PHP 4.4.9.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release.

Issues corrected by this release include an upgrade to the PCRE version, a crash bug in imageloadfont and the open_basedir handling in the curl extension. You can download this latest release from downloads page on the PHP.net website.

As a reminder to all of those wanting to submit papers to this year's php|works/PyWorks combo conference, today is your last day!

As with all our conferences, our main goal is to provide our attendees - mostly a highly technical crowd who is looking for specific, to-the-point information on relevant developer topics - with content that is as relevant as possible to their daily lives. [...] If you have a cool idea about a product or platform that somehow relates to PHP, we definitely want to hear from you!

Check out this page for some of the guidelines (and suggestions) about submitting your proposal. The Call for Papers will close at the end of the day, July 25th, 2008 and all talks must be submitted via email to proposals@phparch.com for consideration.

As Ivo Jansch pointed out yesterday it's a month until the fateful day that PHP4 will officially die:

It's July the 8th. Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

August 8th marks the point when nothing (at all) will be done to any version of PHP4 again. Full support ended back in December of 2007 with no new versions being released. 8-8-08 marks the end of that as well and PHP4 developers that discover bugs may not be able to get them fixed.

Ivo sums it it perfectly:

I'm not trying to scare you. No wait, I am. Don't let 8-8-8 become the PHP community's 6-6-6 and abandon PHP4 while you still can.

DevShed finishes off their series looking a private, public and protected variables and methods in classes with this final look a private methods in PHP5 object-oriented programming.

It's time to leap forward and tackle this final article of the series, which will be focused on covering some additional aspects concerning the use of this kind of class method. In addition, I'll teach you how to utilize the "final" keyword, which is included with PHP 5, to prevent the methods of a specific class from being overridden by any subclass.

They work from a hands-on example to show how they can work with private methods (expanding a bit from last time) and how to use the "final" keyword to restrict any and all modification for a method.

As Ivo Jansch mentions, the speaker list for this year's Dutch PHP conference has been finalized:

Based on feedback from the 'call for ideas' we have added a session on security. It will be presented by Johann-Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower. Also, we are happy to announce that Terry Chay, a well-known blogger in the PHP community and informally called the 'PHP terrorist', will deliver the closing keynote.

You can check out the rest of the presentations (5 tutorials and 12 sessions) on the conference's schedule page and, if you haven't already yet, you can still register to reserve your spot to enjoy this great event (talks only, tutorials are sold out).

The PHP Group has officially released the latest version of the PHP 4.4.x series - version 4.4.8 (mostly security fixes) - also the final release of the PHP 4.4.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.8. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last normal PHP 4.4 release. If necessary, releases to address security issues could be made until 2008-08-08.

Among the issues corrected are things with chunk_split, an overflow in str[c]spn, regression in glob with open_basedir and correcting the INIFILE LOCAL option. Check out the Changelog for a full list of changes.

See also the "tribute" Derick Rethans gives this final version of the PHP4 series.

Since it's been moved up into the "Final Draft" stage in its proposal process, Padraic Brady wanted to blog about this latest update for the OAuth Specification, a standardized protocol that allows secure API authentication from both desktop and web applications.

Because I love all things OpenID related and am an OpenID "pusher" in Europe (blame the OpenID Europe Foundation membership on Snorri Giorgetti), I'll be proposing a PHP5 implementation of OAuth to the Zend Framework (assuming no other OAuth proposal) and PEAR (PEAR because that's now the home of my OpenID For PHP library under proposal).

You can get more information about OAuth from the project's website.

Christian Wenz has pointed out the latest release of the WS02 web services framework today - WS02 WSF/PHP version 1.0.0 - as released by the WS02 group.

The framework comes in form of a PHP extension and is available both as source code and as a binary distribution. Additional information exists in form of a manual, an installation guide, and of course release notes.

Key features of the framework include a client API, a server API, MTOM attachments, WS-Security, WS-Reliable messaging, and WSDL generation/consumption. You can get more information about the framework from its project page on the ws02 website.