Continuing on his his series looking at improvements in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release, Johannes Schluter uses this new post to look at some of the new data structures their update will have to offers in the Standard PHP Library.

In the programming world there are quite a few well understood and explored data structures. Which are commonly used in tons of applications, still the only things PHP offered till 5.3 in regards to structuring data were arrays (more precise: hash tables) and objects. So people had to either abuse them for other structures or implement the structures themselves on top of these. Thanks to Etienne things now are changing and PHP's Standard PHP Library (SPL) extension will offer quite a few standard implementations of data structures.

These new data structures are SplDoublyLinkedList, SplStack, SplQueue/SplPirorityQueue, SplHeap/SplMinHeap/SplMaxHeap and SplFixedArray. He explains a bit of what they are and more detail on one specifically - SplFixedArray.

On the Northclick Blog Soenke Ruempler has shared the new name for their message queue software they're developing (see here) - dropr.

Why? When Boris was writing the client angel script he somehow named it "dropr". As we neither got better suggestions nor had any other idea we just decided for this name. Actually the name is a little bit fun because all those stupidR startupRs. But it's nice and somehow our framework drops message into queues.

Check out the project's homepage for more information including installation instructions, methods to download the latest version, some FAQs and a roadmap for where the project's going.

On the Northclick blog, Soenke Ruempler has posted an update on the "message queue" project based on a previous draft.

Some time has elapsed since we wrote our draft for a message queue system written in and for PHP. Now it's time to give you guys an update and working beta-code. [...] You can find the project homepage at https://opensource.ruempler.eu/pmq/. We'd be proud if you have some cool naming tips for this project - we haven't registered a domain yet. At the moment it's temporarily called "PHP Message Queue".

Check out the post for more specifics about the updates/advancements they've made or you can download the current code from their SVN repository.

Soenke Ruempler has posted today about something they found a need for in their group and wanted to create something they could share back with the community when it was done - a Message Queue System developed in PHP.

You'll find a Draft for a php-based messaging system below. We'd be glad if we get some comments from the readers. Because we're heavily using open source we want to give something back to the community and make the message queue system open source. And, yes, if someone is planning something like this or already knows a solution, please let us know, too. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel!

He fleshes out the proposal by describing it in three sections - the problem the need came from, some of the existing solutions the web has to offer (including the Java Message Service and IBM's XMS messaging) and the actual draft of the implementation including the architecture, scalability, a name (none yet) and where they're going from here.