Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

Michael is back with part three of his series stepping you through the creation of your own MVC framework (Part 1 and Part 2) with a look at the part that interfaces with the user - the View.

Using the view as a starting point may seem odd at first considering the view-related actions are some of the last steps in the page load scenario, but since our views don't have any external dependencies, unit tests are very easy to write and so is the accompanying code.

He explains how views work along with the rest of the framework and some of the basic rules surrounding how they get their data. Code comes along with the explanations for different views like XML, HTML and JSON methods of output.

In dealing with a little JSON encoding and objects in a project of his recently, Cal Evans bumped against a problem when he was encoding an object and moving it back and forth between the back and front ends.

The problem is simple, JSON encode a PHP object and send it back to the front end. Sounds simple and the last 100 times I wrote this code it was simple. This time, I was too smart for my own good. Here's the scenario.

He illustrates his problem - the "dropping" of properties somewhere along the way - with a sample class that encodes the object and sends it along. He missed one key bit of information, though. His protected array of properties wasn't getting passed back out correctly and we're in the resulting JSON message. A quick hack of a getProperties() function call made this problem a thing of the past.

On his Adobe blog, Charlie Key has a new post demonstrating how you can transmit data back and forth between a Flex application and PHP using JSON messages.

In almost every RIA data needAdobe Flex makes implementing this solution an easy task. The solution explained in this tutorial uses PHP for the server-side programming and sends the data using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) encoding. By the end of the tutorial you will be sending simple objects along with arrays of objects from your PHP code to your Flex client.s to be transmitted from a server to the client. [...]

There's a list of things you'll need to get started, the files you'll need to work with in the tutorial, and the steps to follow to make things work together nicely. Plenty of PHP and Flex code is included.