If you're a fan of open source development and can't get enough about projects and what's the latest in the online OS community as a whole, you'll definitely enjoy The Changelog (it's a weekly podcast and news site).

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

Following up from his (now infamous) MicroPHP manifesto, Ed Finkler has this new post to his blog answering some of the common questions he's gotten about his beliefs.

My previous post, The MicroPHP Manifesto, resulted in much excitement. In between fits of rage and crying, I found some time to answer folks questions, and also discuss the topic on the /dev/hell podcast with my cohost Chris Hartjes. To summarize and address some of the common questions, I felt I should write a small FAQ.

Questions asked so far include:

• So you think full-stack frameworks suck?
• You need a large framework to enforce best practices!
• You should check out my microframework!
• How do you choose what gets listed in the MicroPHP code collection?
• Why do you hate Rush?

If you have a question you don't see listed, drop him a note and he'll add to the post with more answers.

On the PEAR blog today there's an update about the migration over to github that 5 million lines of code has already made:

Since October 2011, 5 million lines of the PEAR codebase has shifted to github. Hand in hand with this shift has been the tireless work of Daniel C - someone who brazenly said "I will fix the failing packages!" in the tail end of last year.

As a result of his efforts a list has been created of known good packages to use with PHP 5.4. Other results include:

• All test infrastructure upgrading to PHP 5.4 release candidates
• All database driven test suites executing properly, catching a variety of simple bugs
• Hitting a point of "near zero" patches to be applied to unmaintained packages
• Increasingly, the PEAR QA team is delivering PHP 5.3+ friendly forks of existing packages

On the Nelm.io blog today there's a new post (part one of a series) about using Composer and Packagist to manage PHP applications as packages.

You may have heard about Composer and Packagist lately. In short, Composer is a new package manager for PHP libraries. Quite a few people have been complaining about the lack of information, or just seemed confused as to what it was, or why the hell we would do such a thing. This is my attempt at clarifying things.

The briefly explains what the tool(s) do and shows how to set up the configuration on both sides - Composer to manage the packages and the package definition configurations (including meta about the project and any dependencies). He also answers several "why" questions about the need for a package manager, using this versus PEAR, the choice of JSON for config definition and a current status of the project.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post highlighting the use of pChart to graph out the data from your PHP application. pChart provides an easy interface to draw graphs with GD, supporting alpha transparency, shadowing, spline/cubic curves and much more.

Created and maintained by Jean-Damien Pogolotti, a systems engineer based in Toulouse, France, pChart is a library that creates anti-aliased charts and graphs using PHP. It's object-oriented code has been recently redesigned and makes it easy to add beautiful, eye-catching data. The library is free for non-profit use and for inclusion in GPL distributed software; licensing plans for other uses start at just 50 Euro. In this article I'll take you through installing pChart and using it to generate a basic chart, line chart and plot graph.

He walks you through the download and installation of the tool as well as showing the code you'll need to include to get started with a first script. Their examples show how to create both single- and three-series charts with some sample data and some screenshots of output.

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted about interfacing with GitHub in PHP, using their API to hook into and pull down information about users and repositories.

The Git-based project hosting service GitHub is certainly the belle of today's technology ball, having attracted more than 1 million registered users and amassed more than 2 million hosted projects in less than three years. [...] GitHub High Scores and GitHub Badges are two examples of third-party services created using the GitHub API, which is capable of carrying out any task you might wish to perform via GitHub.com. With it you can create, edit and search repositories, learn more about fellow GitHub users, and manage repository issues.

Jason shows how to use the php-github-api library to connect to the API, search repository information, get user details, finding their repositories and accessing restricted resources (things only available for the authenticated user like updating your account or working with your own repositories).

In a new post to his blog Brian Swan explains why the latest versions of PHP (the 5.3.x series) are faster now on Windows than some previous versions have been. (Hint: updated technology can work wonders sometimes)

[Rasmus Lerdorf recently said at a Seattle meetup] "If you aren't running PHP 5.3 on Windows, you're lucky…because you have a 40% performance boost coming." He clarified this by saying that, with some help from Microsoft, improvements were made in PHP 5.3 that led to a 40% performance improvement of PHP on Windows. Because he didn't go into the details of why this performance boost was realized, I got questions in email the next day asking about why.

The information in a borrowed slide (from a presentation by Pierre Joye) shows what the differences between the versions are - things like the use of a more modern compiler (VC9 vs VC6), calls to the Win32 API directly and better library management.

Rasmus Lerdorf has a new post to his blog sharing the results of some "investigative hacking" he did to see if making ZeroMQ and libevent work together was difficult. Thankfully, the answer was "not hard at all".

While waiting for a connection in Frankfurt I had a quick look at what it would take to make ZeroMQ and libevent co-exist in PHP and it was actually quite easy. Well, easy after Mikko Koppanen added a way to get the underlying socket fd from the ZeroMQ PHP extension. To get this working, install the PHP ZeroMQ extension and the PHP libevent extension.

He includes a sample script show the results of his work, a basic server and client that sends a request to the ZeroMQ server and fires off an event using the libevent library (via PHP's extension. You can find out more about using these two libraries in the PHP manual - libevent and ZeroMQ

On Dzone.com today Giorgio Sironi has a new post looking at a relatively new release on the social networking scene for developers, the Google+ Api, and some details on how you get get started writing apps using the features it offers.

Google+ recently releases to developers the first version of its Api, which focuses on public data about profiles and their activities: status updates, resharings and links. I dived into the Api and wrote a small sample application to get a feel of how easy is to get started, and what can we do with the Api for now. All the code is at the bottom of this post.

He goes through the steps you'll need to get set up - registering an application, getting a library to help make the connection (here's a PHP one) and configuring it with your credentials. You can get "People" and "Activities" information from the API. He shows some sample output for each - basic user information (nested arrays) and some of his activities (again, nested arrays). He includes the source for his sample application that pulls a user's profile information and lists out their latest (public) activities.

Håvard Eide has a new post sharing a tool he's created (based on some ideas presented in this netflix blog post) for testing a web service. Specifically, his tool helps you test a web service developed with the Slim framework.

I just pushed a example on how to create a Slim framework to github. The idea is that whenever you create a webservice with the Slim framework (which is really simple) you rarely test for failure, the ChaosMonkey class will help you to do just that. When initialized with the AbsoluteChaos plugin it will randomly kill the webservice with exceptions, garbage to the output, or just run the service for you without failure at all.

His plugin does a lot of things right now, but it's easy to extend with your own failure types - like his suggested "networkSleep" or something that could kill the connection to MySQL. He includes a code snippet in the post of how to hook Slim and ChaosMonkey together for some testing fun.