Freek Lijten has posted another "Currently on PHP's internals..." post to his blog today (here's the previous one) with a look at the discussions around the idea of having "property accessors" in PHP - a standardized way of defining getters/setters in objects.

Today I will be discussing a feature that at this moment is called "Property Accessor". It is a method of defining getters and setters. Originally an RFC was defined as early as september 2009, but recently new discussion took place and an actual patch was created. There is no certainty this feature will ever make a PHP version but discussion seems to target implementation details and not the feature itself, so things are looking bright for this feature.

There's two RFCs posted about the topic - the original proposal (from Dennis Robinson) and a patch for implementing them (from Clint Priest). The proposal replaces the common magic getters/setters (__get & __set) with the optional "get" and "set" keywords inside of custom-defined properties.

Alexey Zakhlestin has a new post today with some of his own thoughts on the suggestion for a built-in web server (RFC) that's been floating around lately - a tool that would act as a simple server right out of the box without much in the way of configuration.

There are a lot of talks today about "Built-in web server" [for PHP] RFC by Moriyoshi Koizumi. There is a nice discussion on Hacker News (and 2 threads on reddit: here and here). So, here's couple of cents from me.

Alexey agrees with the suggestion and notes it'd be a welcome addition to the PHP toolset. He also reminds developers that it wouldn't (and shouldn't) be used in production.

In a quick post to his blog Lukas Smith talks about the proposal for traits support that's been pending for PHP for a while now. Recent updates have been made to it, so it's come back up to the front of developer's minds:

Stefan has since tweaked the proposal and in the latest version it includes an alternative approach called Grafts along with the original Traits idea, which is essentially language level delegation pattern support. I am absolutely sure that we will either see Traits or Grafts in the next non patch release of PHP (aka 5.4 or 6.0).

Lukas would like to see the support go in sooner than later, so he requests some comments and thoughts on the proposed functionality and to leave them as comments on his blog entry.

Matthew Turland has posted a call to action for all of those PHP developers out there content to sit back and just request features for the language - get up and get involved!

A question that seems to be popping up more and more these days is, "When will PHP 6 be released?" It's especially annoying because the people that enjoy an exercise in futility ask this question are the same people that simply refuse to take WIR [When it's ready] for an answer. Or maybe they just read into the hype generated by trigger-happy publishers who want to preempt a stable release, I don't really know.

He points out some of the current stats - PHP 5.3's beta release date as coming to the original date, that PHP 6 code hasn't even been moved outside of CVS and the amount of work left to be done on it before its even close to being ready. This is where you come in - the internals folks contribute their time (off-hours usually) to developing the language and can only do so much:

So respect them and their time and stop asking when it's going to be ready, because they don't really know much better [about PHP6] than you do.

He also suggests two other things that you can do to keep up with the current state of development - keep your version updated and track the RFCs to see what features are being added and any bugs that might still be open for pre-release. You have to be proactive about keeping up with the current status - otherwise, you have no room to ask, over and over, "when will it be done?"

Today on the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen reminds the community about a "one-stop resource" that they can use to keep up to date on some of the latest happenings with the PHP language, the PHP.net wiki.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

In a recent blog post Chris Hartjes is asking the community (more specifically the CakePHP community) for their opinions on his thoughts for a deployment method for CakePHP apps.

While I really prefer to use tools like this for deployment, I understand that not everyone wants to mess with standalone programs and configuration files. I've been asked before about Cake-specific deployment techniques, so I figure the easiest way is to see about adding a task to the Cake console.

His idea consists of two new commands - "cake deploy config" and "cake deploy" to make it simple to set up and directly deploy applications without having to go to outside software.

On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine has pointed out a proposal from Stefan Marr to include functionality for traits in PHP.

As a language construct within PHP it would be very easy to do the same, but easier to learn and to use. Beside some keyword issues (the RFC uses "use" as keyword, but this will of course conflict with namespaces) I'm wondering what this will have an impact on reflection - the RFC stays unclear about this.

A trait is a free-floating chink of functionality that, instead of being confined to a class (or file) that has to be called on to use it, exists where the developer can use it from anywhere at any time. This helps solve some of the issues with single inheritance in PHP.

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.