On the KingFoo blog today there's an excellent look at everything new coming up in PHP 5.4, the next version of PHP set to be released in early February.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

In this quick new post to his blog Mark Story talks about two new errors he ran across when upgrading his installation to PHP 5.4, both showing up under E_ALL.

I've been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

The two he mentions deal with a new warning on illegal string offsets and the other about string offsets ("Notice: String offset cast occurred"). You can find out about more changes in the PHP 5.4 series in the various Changelogs for each Release Candidate and beta release.

In a new post to DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi asks developers what new feature of PHP 5.4 is the most important to you and your application development?

Recently, the voting process for PHP 5.4 open to committers and users have been closed. We now have a clear picture of what will make the release and what will be left out. Some of these features (traits, web server) were already in, while other have been just voted and will be completed before the general availability of the release.

He lists out some of the major changes that'll be coming in the 5.4 release including traits, dereferencing, the built-in HTTP server, closure type hinting and the upload progress feature previously only in an extension. The end of the post includes a poll for you to give your feedback on what you think is the most important. As of the time of this post, the array dereferencing has pulled into the lead with traits coming in second.

Phil Sturgeon, a developer on the Fuel framework project, has a new post to his blog asking a common question of all developers that set out to make the "Next Big Framework" - why write a new framework?

So we all know that the internet is full of frameworks. They've been the popular thing for the last 5 or 6 years and it seems to have become the "barrier for entry" or the "passage of rights" that 8 or 9 years ago used to be "hey I just wrote a phpBB clone!". There are plenty around but in this day in age, why would anyone write a new one? As somebody involved in a new PHP framework - Fuel - that has shaken a few opinions up I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and views on the situation.

While he agrees that there are plenty of other frameworks out there, maybe too many to choose from, he thinks that there's value in making something that's useful to you and the toolsets you're already used to. One of their goals with Fuel is to "make PHP as fun to use" as possible and things like built-in migrations and scaffolding (along with a command-line tool, Oil) help towards that goal.

A framework is essentially a way to put all of your best practises into a single place so that you can reuse them over and over again. This should make you more efficient and make your time more financially viable to clients. If the framework you use slows you down or does not cater for the way you like to develop then sack it off and do your own thing.

On the Web Builder Zone today Gorgio Sironi asks you, the larger development population of the web, what framework would you use today to start a new application?

One of the difficult parts of framework adoption, especially in the PHP world, is about choosing the right framework. There is a proliferation of open source solutions and a team must analyze the overall picture thoroughly before locking itself into a particular framework. Changing the framework which an application is built with without shaking its foundations would be probably impossible after a certain period of development.

He lists a few of the things he looks for in a framework - functionality, performance, community and a good license - and asks for some feedback (in the form of a poll) as to which you'd prefer to use next. He's narrowed it down to four options: Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter and CakePHP. (Expect plenty of comments asking "what about [insert framework here]?")

Simas Toleikis has a new post to his blog looking at a feature that'll be included in PHP 5.4 - something developers have been wanting for a long time - traits.

As a long-time internals.php mailing list reader I am going to tell you a small secret - the first alpha release for PHP 5.4 should be just around the corner. This release is packed with some welcome new language features, usual bug fixes followed by some performance and memory management improvements. One of the noteworthy language additions are Traits - a brand new horizontal code reuse mechanism.

He explains traits as a better way to do the "kind-of" inheritance that PHP does now with parent and child classes, making it easier to reuse functionality from classes even though they don't share the same parent. With the "use" keyword (not to be confused with the "use" keyword in namespaces) you can include common functionality into class methods and even accommodate for naming conflicts and requirements.

Matthew Turland has a new to his blog today about some of the new SPL features in PHP 5.3 (and was eventually made into this presentation).

The SPL, or Standard PHP Library, is an often overlooked extension in the PHP core. It first came on the scene in PHP 5 and a variety of iterators constituted the majority of its initial offerings. Though the iterator offerings were expanded in PHP 5.3, the particularly interesting additions to the SPL were several specialized data structure classes, the foundational concepts for which originate in the field of computer science. In this post, I will provide an overview of these new classes and explain why and when they should be used.

Matthew talks about some of the new advancements in working with arrays, creating fixed arrays, handling lists (linked and doubly-linked), stackes, queues, heaps and hash maps. He also includes some benchmark information and graphs of some tests he ran comparing the SPL methods to some of their normal PHP counterparts.

In this recent post to his blog Johannes Schluter talks about a method he's suggested for testing objects in unit tests - overriding the "new" operator to replace specific classes with mocks.

Two years ago at some conference I had a conversation with Sebastian about the need for a way to overload the new operator in PHP so, probably, bad designed code can be tested more easily by replacing specific classes with mocks. [...] Sebastian then pushed the code as part of a new test_helpers extension with some documentation to github and I fixed some bugs in it. The aim of the extension is to collect functionality which might be beneficial for phpUnit and other test scenarios but which should never reach a production environment.

He includes some sample code to show it in action - defining the mock class, using the set_new_overload function to define it as what should be called when the "new" operator is used and a dump of the result.

Brandon Savage has written a sort of letter to those developers new to the PHP community and to the language to encourage them to not worry, that things will come in time.

Every day, new people join the PHP world, writing their first "hello world" script and moving on from there to connect to databases, build CRUDs, and otherwise explore the PHP language. If you're one of them, you shouldn't feel inadequate. No, learning PHP is a learning process. One of PHP's strengths is that it is easy to learn, and that anyone can learn how to do it. Fewer can learn how to do it properly, but for those that do learn how to do it right, it can be a powerful language and a solid tool.

He reminds the developers that it's okay to ask for help when you need it (like on forums or IRC) and that reading things like blogs and the manual can help you more than anything else.

New from NETTUTS.com today is a tutorial on creating a new scroller, a ticker of the latest information from your choice of news feeds. They use the SimplePie parser (PHP-based) to do most of the work.

This week, we'll learn how to combine PHP, SimplePie, and jQuery to build a simple news scroller widget for your website. It's much easier than you might think; so let's begin.

Their application (source is here) combines PHP - well, SimplePie - and a custom jQuery extension. The screencast walks you through each step the code takes and, and the end, you'll have a simple news block that can show as many of the latest news items ad you'd like.