Michael Kimsal has put together a small page to help you get started using the phpUnderControl continuous integration system:

If you're not using phpUnderControl, you owe it to yourself to check it out, as I think 'continuous integration' will likely change the way you think of development. I've used CruiseControl in the past for PHP, but the PHP-specifics phpUnderControl brings to the project are too much to pass up.

The page mentions some of the common issues you might have in getting started - installation problem, the use of the PHP Code Sniffer and the Project Mess Detector from PHPUnit.

According to this post on the PEAR blog, the first PEAR bug triage is now over:

PEAR's bug tracker hit the 600+ open bugs mark a month ago. [...] So with 600+ open bugs (not including the feature requests), we had to do something. [...] The logical step was to hold our own bug smashing event and see how it works for PEAR.

Back on March 22nd and 23rd (Easter weekend) they hunted for bugs. Several developers showed to help out and many bugs were fixed and they managed to bring the number of open bugs for PEAR down to 547 with the two days of work. There were some milestones reached too:

Thanks to the triage, we are close to reaching two important milestones: Closing bug reports with lower bug ID than 1000 (1 bug left!) and 2000 (5 left).

In some thoughts related to the just-passed religious holiday, Alan Knowles decided to come up with another series of 7 deadly sins one could commit in their PHP (CMS) development.

Among those on the list are things like:

• Defines for configuration
• Filenaming
• If your code is public, you should try not to ridicule yourself.
• Mixing PHP and HTML

Check out the rest of the post and some of the interesting comments that follow.

Eirik Hoem has posted an update on a previous problem he was having when working with SOAP in PHP and its handling of arrays.

The scenario was that when an array with only one object was returned over SOAP the array was discarded and pointed straight to the single object.

Come to find out, this behavior wasn't a bug, it was a feature - the fix is to add another parameter to the initialization of the SoapClient to add the SOAP_SINGLE_ELEMENT_ARRAYS feature.

In dealing with a little JSON encoding and objects in a project of his recently, Cal Evans bumped against a problem when he was encoding an object and moving it back and forth between the back and front ends.

The problem is simple, JSON encode a PHP object and send it back to the front end. Sounds simple and the last 100 times I wrote this code it was simple. This time, I was too smart for my own good. Here's the scenario.

He illustrates his problem - the "dropping" of properties somewhere along the way - with a sample class that encodes the object and sends it along. He missed one key bit of information, though. His protected array of properties wasn't getting passed back out correctly and we're in the resulting JSON message. A quick hack of a getProperties() function call made this problem a thing of the past.

As Cal Evans and others in the PHP community have pointed out, there's a post on Tim Bray's blog (of Sun Microsystems) with his prediction for PHP for the upcoming year:

The short version: PHP will remain popular but its growth will slow, as people get nervous about its maintainability and security stories.

He does mention the two different stances of this statement - the good side (with low entry level, good applications and speed) and the stance he seems to believe in more - that there are just things about PHP and how its handled that could cause major issues down the line.

Be sure to check out the comments for community views on both sides of the story too.

According to Tony Bibbs, PHP's real problem is itself.:

So what do I mean when I say PHP's problem is PHP itself? [...] One word. Sustainability.

He suggests that, while PHP has made a big splash in the areas it's hit, it is still tripping over its own feet. PHP, the language, can meet the needs of just about any sort of web development that might come down the line, but when good PHP developers are so hard to find, why should any organization bother with working it into their technology stack?

Comments on the article responds to the "chicken and egg situation" Tony has presented and how things like user groups can help stoke the fires of PHP's presence in not only the budding web developers but also in the professionals looking to expand their horizons.

In a new blog post Tony Bibbs talks about an issue that he's been having (an "oh so familiar problem") when trying to install the Zend Studio Neon IDE - the same as last time, an issue with a locked resource.

The fix this time was a bit more cumbersome because the unpacking of files happens during the install not when you explicitly uncompress the tarball. However the Internet proved to be a valuable resource again as I found the fix from a blog by someone overseas.

The solution involved breaking the installer (pushing it to the background for a bit) at a certain point, executing a command to replace the variable name and resuming the install process to complete a correct software installation.