Sergey Zhuk has a new post to his site that hopes to help you better understand "ticks" in ReactPHP. Ticks are a feature of the tool that are used to track when a process or queue has been executed.

Tick is one loop iteration where every callback in the queues has been executed synchronously and in order. ReactPHP event loop implementation has two main methods to work with ticks: nextTick [and] futureTick.

Both methods can be used to schedule a callback to be invoked on a future iteration of the event loop. When being executed a callback receives an instance of the event loop as an argument. But then what’s the difference between next and future ticks? Let’s figure this out.

He then starts in talking about the difference between "future" and "next" ticks, illustrating with a simple "stream select" loop. He then shows how to work with the tick queue for both the future and next ticks and what the result is of each function call inside them. He includes the output of his sample scripts and what happens if a few things change.

Consider a tick as one loop iteration where every callback in the queues has been executed synchronously and in order. That means that a tick could be long, it could be short, but we want it to be as short as possible. So, don’t place long-running tasks in callbacks, because they will block the loop. When a tick a being stretched out, the event loop won’t be able to check the events, which means losing performance for your asynchronous code.

On the main PHP.net site today there's an announcement posted about the working being done on the next generation of the PHP language based on some recent discussions (and actual development work). The PHPNG branch helps boost the performance of the language to new levels and cleans up some of the core APIs.

When we aren't looking for pictures of kittens on the internet, internals developers are nearly always looking for ways to improve PHP, a few developers have a focus on performance. Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted. During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API's should be changed. This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov.

The post talks about the performance increase of these changes (an average of 20%) and the current progress made on the internal project. This is "only the start" of the work on this new functionality, so keep an eye on the PHP.net site for more upcoming details.

Florin Patan has posted about what he calls the next big thing in PHP - his observations of the current state of the language/community and what could be coming down the road.

What's the next big thing in PHP? Or more accurately, how do you get to wish/want for a next big thing in PHP? PHP currently is seen as a jack of all trades, master none by most of people outside of PHP world and it's starting to look the same way for people who are using it as well. How did we got there?

He spends a lot of the post talking about the future of PHP, though - what could be coming along with a PHP 6 release. He suggests that, with the way things are going, PHP could not be around too much longer if something dosen't change. He also makes several suggestions to the core PHP developers about what they could do to help the situation including strong typed variables, a "smarter parser" and a poll for PHP.net asking the users what they want in the language.

This should be the next big thing in PHP. Collaboration and better community interface for both worlds, users and devs. Help us help you on PHP6, help us making a better world for everyone using PHP.

Derick Rethans (master of all things date and time in PHP) has a new post to his blog showing how to correctly get the "next month" since the date string parser doesn't understand how to use that string directly.

Over and over again PHP users complain that next month in PHP's date-string parser doesn't go to the next month, but instead skips to the one after next month.

He describes what happens internally, how PHP bumps up the month and counts the number of days, and how you can use some of newer features in the PHP 5.3 release to get the first day of the next month. Specifically, this means using the "first day of next month" string for the modify() call on the DateTime object. If you're not on PHP 5.3 yet, Derick also includes a method in the comments to do it a slightly different way.

In a new blog post, Chris Hartjes asks what's the next stack coming up on the horizon. LAMP has been the king for so long now it's hard to think about what might be next, but he takes a stab at it:

So the next thing I've been wondering about is about what future PHP stacks will look like, at least on the open source side of things. Have we gotten to the point where this is as good as it gets?

He looks at other stacks he's been working with (like LNNP - Linux, nginx, Postgres and PHP) as well as the question of limitations. Are we limiting ourselves by relying on LAMP too much? What else is out there? Does Javascript have a permenant place in any of this? (jLAMP anyone?)

Greg Beaver, the ever-vigilant promoter and coder of the PEAR project has announced the latest version of the PEAR project has been released - version 1.4.9.

The latest stable release of the PEAR installer, version 1.4.9, has been released at pear.php.net. This release addresses a critical bug introduced in the release of PEAR 1.4.8 earlier this month. This version has been rigorously tested to ensure no future breakage (the last release had inordinate time pressure due to external circumstances). You can read about it and retrieve it at http://pear.php.net/PEAR.

Also mentioned in the post is their embarking on the next leap in PEAR's evolution - version 1.5.0. It won't be a major leap up (like from 1.3.x to 1.4.x), but many changes will be made - including extensive work on how PECL extensions are installed and implemented.

Greg Beaver, the ever-vigilant promoter and coder of the PEAR project has announced the latest version of the PEAR project has been released - version 1.4.9.

The latest stable release of the PEAR installer, version 1.4.9, has been released at pear.php.net. This release addresses a critical bug introduced in the release of PEAR 1.4.8 earlier this month. This version has been rigorously tested to ensure no future breakage (the last release had inordinate time pressure due to external circumstances). You can read about it and retrieve it at http://pear.php.net/PEAR.

Also mentioned in the post is their embarking on the next leap in PEAR's evolution - version 1.5.0. It won't be a major leap up (like from 1.3.x to 1.4.x), but many changes will be made - including extensive work on how PECL extensions are installed and implemented.