The Pro::PHP Podcast has released their latest episode - the Newscast for December 20th, 2007.

Topics mentioned include:

• PHPCity
• Thoughts on PHP as the next Java
• The Google Charting API
• Profiling PHP applications

To grab this latest show you can either subscribe to their feed or you can just get the latest show via a direct mp3 download.

Gergely Hodicska has posted part four of his "what's new in PHP 5.3" series - a sort of "wrapup" for some of the smaller features that have been added. Among them are:

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

Christian Stocker briefly mentions a new addition he's made to the post-PHP5.3 branching of the main trunk of the PHP development - XSLT profiling.

After PHP 5.3 was branched (for making place for - among other new stuff - namespaces), it was finally time to put my XSLT profiling addition into the official PHP sources.

The addition allows you to check in on your XSLT translations and see which spots in it are taking the most time to parse. This can be a very valuable tool when trying to see into the "black box" that PHP has around XSLT transformations. PHP 5.2ers can get the same functionality with this patch too.

php|architect magazine has released their latest issue - the August 2007 edition. The cover story for this month is a piece by Dirk Merkel covering the automation and benchmarking/code profiling of your application to find potential issues before your customers/users do.

Other great articles in this issue include:

• a look at Flex and the Zend Framework
• part one of a series on normalization (Chinese)
• using cURL to extract pages and their data
• "The Job Interview" - an insiders guide.

There's two ways to get this issue - you can either subscribe to the magazine for a year (the PDF edition is only $40 USD) or you can buy the single issue for about $5 USD.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks has posted an interesting bit asking about a PHP frontend for Xdebug profiling, specifically for the 2.x version's output.

Several of the comments either ask why he would want to write it when the two tools he mentions work just fine or a few links to scripts out there that already do this sort of thing. If you've been looking for something like this, definitely check out this post - there's a few resources in there you don't want to miss.