According to this new post on the PEAR blog, the new PEAR Group has been officially elected:

I am more than glad to announce the arrival, the announcement of the new PEAR Group for 2009 and 2010. With a few fresh faces in the Group, this year looks very promising with the mix of both new blood and experienced PEAR Group members.

Those selected include Chuck Burgess, Ken Guest, Christian Weiske and Brett Bieber. The PEAR Group helps to guide the PEAR project as a while and push out initiatives like the updated package manager - Pyrus.

Johannes Schluter has posted a look at a handy little script that shows an interface between the returned MySQLi results and an SPL iterator.

When using MySQLi's multi_query to send queries which return multiple result sets you have to use a rather unintuitive API which can certainly be improved. Recently I sat down and cooked up a small improvement for that, being an iterator fan I, of course, had to use an iterator for that and implemented the following class.

The class extends the standard Iterator and provides the interfaces to work through the results of the query in your choice of Iterator-supporting looping structure. Example code for the class and its usage are both included.

Chris Jones has written up another post about a feature in some of the latest OCI8 libraries for PHP - result caching.

Oracle Database 11g introduced "server-side"and "client-side" result caches. The database cache is enabled with the RESULT_CACHE_MODE database parameter, which has several modes. With the default mode, queries for which you want results to be cached need a hint added - No PHP changes are required.

This caching is perfect for results from smaller lookup tables and can drop CPU usage by quite a bit. Oracle automatically takes care of validating the cache entries when something changes the stored results so your query is always fetching the latest (without having to worry about a timestamp on the cache or anything like that). He gives a few examples of how it would work, comparing the queries both with and without the caching.

The IBM developerWorks has a new tutorial they've posted (free registration required) looking at making a Yahoo! SearchMonkey application by combining an RDF document, transforming it with XSLT and binding it all together with PHP.

SearchMonkey is the first product from a mainstream search engine provider that takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies to enable you to produce more relevant search results and thus drive more traffic to your Web site. With common Web development technologies such as PHP, XSLT, and XPath, provide a better experience for searchers as you use structured data encoded in Web pages using Semantic Web standards such as Microformats, eRDF, and RDFa.

They start the tutorial by introducing the SearchMonkey technology and a sample application showing how to interface with it (enhancing the search results for the blogspot.com blogs). The XSLT comes in when formatting the RDF data (DataRSS) by overlaying the data on existing websites.

DevShed continues their look at using the CodeIginiter PHP framework to build a sample application in this latest part of their series - a look a paginating the database results from a query.

As you may guess, however, Code Igniter comes bundled with a robust set of core classes, which can be used to perform all sorts of clever tasks, such as working with databases, performing file uploads, validating user-supplied data, and so forth. [...] I'm going to show you how to improve the MySQL-driven application developed in the preceding tutorial, since it'll be provided with the capacity for paging database records, via the pager class included with Code Igniter.

He starts by reviewing the previous part of the series, pulling the data from MySQL, then shows how to push that through the pagination component to create a simple user listing.

At the Developer Tutorials blog mentions, a new offering from Yahoo! is making it simple to "spice up" the results for your site when someone searches for it - Yahoo! Searchmonkey. It's a PHP-based platform for creating an application that's returned inline with the search results.

Rasmus Lerdorf has an example of the potential output for a search returning a restaurant's name, links to its menu/wine list, reviews and a link to make a reservation.

There's lots of fun things to do with this tool - check out the developer page for more information and grab the developer tool to jump in and get started building your own custom result.

DevShed has continued their series looking at using the Yahoo! web services with PHP5 in part two - their look at returning the results of a query in serialized arrays.

I'll show you how to parse the results returned by a determined web search service using a few array PHP processing functions. [...] Let's learn how to fetch results returned by the different Yahoo! Search Web Services in the form of serialized PHP arrays

You'll probably want to check out part one of the series before forging on to this second installment - there's a lot of good introductory information in there. With all of that information ingested, you'll have no problem following along with this next part.

They show how to get the results back from a search in an XML format and how, with the simple addition of an optional "output" parameter, can get the same information back in something PHP can natively use (the arrays).

DevShed continues their look at creating a search engine (after part one) with this next tutorial in the series. It focuses on the pagnation of the results from the search query.

In this second tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to add some crucial characteristics to the previously-developed search engine. These include the implementation of paginated results and the ability to perform Boolean searches.

They build on the code from the previous tutorial and add in some simple pagination functionality by changing up the Result class to handle things like counting rows and displaying only a certain number of results at a time. To help make the pagination easier, they've also included a method to keep the search term constant across each page of the results - a custom session handler.

As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:

I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.

Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.

As per php|architect the XAMPP Group has released ther results of a survey for users of the package.

Included in the spotlights of the results were things like:

• Almost half of the XAMPP users would like to also have ASP.NET bundled with XAMPP
• XAMPP is popular not only in private use (91%) but also in the non-profit and educational sectors
• XAMPP users are generally pretty neutral when it comes to frameworks and add-on packages like phpBB and Wordpress being bundled with the package
• Over half would like to see PostgreSQL bundled also, not just MySQL