We can expect big things from Davey Shafik in the coming months - he's been working on a book for php|architect about one of the more powerful bits of functionality in PHP - streams.

For about 6 months now, I've been itching to write a book on the PHP Streams Layer - one of my favorite features of PHP; and also one of the least known considering it's powerful abilities.

He describes his goal simply as this: to create the definitive resource for working with the streams later in PHP. It should be out sometime in the third quarter of 2008, so keep your eye out for it then.

A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:

Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.

On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").

You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

Wez Furlong posted a request for comments to the php.internals and php.pdo mailing lists yesterday about a new ly proposed update to the current PDO functionality - PDO 2. He just wants to clear up a few things...

It became apparent over the past year or so that PDO has been a good and valuable addition to PHP. [...] We believe that having direct involvement from the data access providers would be most effective, which is why we set out to try and get them on board.

There were three steps they would need to make to push things to version two (documentation, define scope/direction and organize data provider integration methods) and the proposal that has caused a huge stir in the community - the idea of requiring a CLA contributors would need to sign.

Comments to this point from the community include:

• Richard Thomas
• Antony Dovgal
• some of Wez's own comments
• Mike Willbanks
• Christopher Jones
• Lukas Smith
• Paul Jones
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• Jay Pipes
• Derick Rethans
• Marco Tabini
• Kristian Kohntopp
• Some PDO humor from David Coallier and Travis Swicegood
• Marcus Borger (and his part two)
• Richard Heyes
• Till's blog entry
• Say No to the CLA

David Coallier has posted about a database abstraction layer that he's been developing for PHP 5.2.x only systems and wants some opinions on his methods:

I made a very light DBAL that uses PHP5.2.x only (Since many people seem to want that) and it has the exact same DSN syntax as MDB2 for now and the query method are also called the same (No API Changes). [...] The main goal of the DBAL is to have a very effective and light way of switching RDBMS but also the possibility to change your DBAL to something more "0feature complete" as such as MDB2.

He includes the list of query method names and the types of databases that he wants it to support (as well as mentioning the fact that it would be unit tested for reliability).