Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

Alex Netkachov has posted some of his own thoughts about Microsoft's recent SQL server 205 driver for PHP:

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

Jeff Moore has posted and shared an interesting graph showing something I'd never thought about comparing one language versus another on - the number of keywords it uses.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

Greg Beaver has blogged about an enhancement in the latest release of phar (1.2.1) - a major speed boost:

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

Greg mentions some other issues that were fixed and a refactoring of some of the stream operations to cut the speed in half.