Joakim passed along a note today about a new web-based frontend for XDebug:

My about page has mentioned a web based frontend for Xdebug for some time. The project has a name now: The idea for Webgrind, a spin on Valgrind, came from lack of profiling tools for PHP, particularly on OSX. Though it is possible to install kcachegrind on osx it seems overkill for many uses and is definitely not as easy as unzipping a folder to the webroot.

He and Jacob Oettinger have started up the project and have posted some initial code over on the Google Code page for Webgrind. You can check out a screenshot of it in action here too.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted his take on some of the killer PHP projects that are out there:

Part of PHP's power is actually found in the variety of open source (free to use) PHP based applications. I'm talking about things like blogs, web frameworks, forums, CMS' etc. I was just thinking, that a list of 'killer' PHP open source projects would be useful

There four on his list so far - WordPress, the Zend Framework, Drupal and Punbb.

To be totally honest about it, we've seen much of the good stuff coming out of the PHP world, in the last few years. PHP developers are leap-frogging ahead with regards to their level of skill and the quality of code they produce.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has posted a few handy tips for PHP developers fond of working in one of the most powerful command-line editors, Vim.

I use Vim for all my editing needs -- TODO lists, email, presentation outlines, coding in any language... everything. So, I thought I'd start sharing some of my vim habits and tools with others, particularly those that pertain to using Vim with PHP.

He includes tips for things like mapping keystrokes (to the PHP interpreter and linter), using the Project plugin to make setting up projects easier and a mention (again) of ctags.

On his blog today, Johnathan Street poses a question - is PHP "good enough" to be used in the scientific community?

There is an accelerating trend in Biology to make data and tools available via web interfaces. In my opinion this is an environment where PHP excels and yet all the literature I've seen discussing the development of these services uses Perl or occasionally Java.

He came across two science-related PEAR packages that were created back in 2003, but not too much since then. He wonders if there's anyone else out there that might feel like PHP is a perfect fit for some of the sort of applications the scientific community could need.

So my question is this. Is anyone out there using PHP in a scientific environment? Are there resources available which I've missed?

David Coallier is looking for a few good men (women, children, pets who can code, etc) to join up with the PHP development group for this year's Google Summer of Code to help with the various ideas they've come up with.

Hello everyone, as mentioned a few weeks ago the most awaited Google Summer of Code is back again this year. This being said, once again the PHP Project has been accepted and we have started posting our list of ideas (http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008).

Some of the projects proposed include:

• PECL, website improvements and Windows Build Support
• Automatic Code Checker
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6
• Build Infrastructure and macro bindings for writing extension in D
• Rewrite the run-tests.php script
• PhD: The PHP based Docbook renderer

Be sure to check out the full list and see where you might want to get involved!

On a bit more controversial note, David Coallier has posted about a rather unpleasant experience he had at this year's PHP Quebec conference - in his own words:

As many of you know, this time of the year is usually the PHP Quebec conference and many php internals and international speakers fly to Montreal to speak. [...] This morning (2008/13/03) I saw Lukas on IRC and we said "Hey let's meet around 1pm to discuss about the PHP TestFest"

He met Lukas at the hotel, in the lounge of the hotel, not attending any of the talks. As he sits there talking to the others, a PHP Quebec staff member walks out and hands him a bill (for around 450 CAD) for attending the conference. After a little checking - both with fellow user group members and with the hotel staff as to the validity of this behavior, he could only assume that it was some "money driven" attempt on the PHP Quebec conference's side to get what they could.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other views from the community.

Both Lukas Smith and Michael Kimsal are talking about a new project started up by the PHP development group to help provide more information to the users (and other developers) of the PHP language - the PHP.net wiki.

Michael comments:

This has been a long time coming and I'm glad to see it in place. I hope it will continue to help open up the development process to a larger audience. [...] This is definitely a large step for the project and I hope it'll get traction and become one of the key tools used to drive PHP forward.

And Lukas talks more about the planning behind the project:

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. [...] I am quite happy that we managed to get this far.

You can check out the wiki yourself at wiki.php.net.

Elizabeth Smith has set out on something she calls the Great Compile Project - her effort to get all dependencies for PHP and PECL compiled on (at the least) Visual Studio 2005 transparently and provided openly.

Anyone crazy enough to help out is more than welcome. I'm currently working on the GTK dependency stack, which will hit quite a few PHP dependencies and PECL extension dependencies in the process. And yes I'd love to submit my hacks/fixes upstream, if someone could find me some information (where do you send libiconv patches?)

Her post mentions some of the things she's already been working on to help further the cause - compiling various Open Source libraries, figuring out issues surrounding MiniGW and some examples of more complex dependency issues she's come across.

David Coallier has posted about the progress that's already being made in the PHP Project - a new wiki that's been installed.

The wiki is of course not opened to everyone in the world (as wikis are usually a source of big mess) but only to developers that have any type of CVS access on the cvs.php.net server.

One of the first orders of business is moving the TODO list out from its current location and into the wiki, making it simple for anyone to check out what the language developers will be working on in the future.

Andrew Johnstone has a new post today with a look at a project he'd worked on - an implementation of a web service with the Zend Framework functionality.

I was recently working on a project to expose our trading systems via XmlRpc, Rest and SOAP. It was quite an interesting project, which took two of us three weeks to develop (Amongst other things).

He talks about some of the issues they worked through (like the ZF's "not quite ready" in the web services department) and problems they found with how the web services functionality was implemented in the framework's components. They also came across two strange bugs - one with accepting raw input and the other with a wrong return type from a method call.