We can expect big things from Davey Shafik in the coming months - he's been working on a book for php|architect about one of the more powerful bits of functionality in PHP - streams.

For about 6 months now, I've been itching to write a book on the PHP Streams Layer - one of my favorite features of PHP; and also one of the least known considering it's powerful abilities.

He describes his goal simply as this: to create the definitive resource for working with the streams later in PHP. It should be out sometime in the third quarter of 2008, so keep your eye out for it then.

Matthew Turland has come across an "interesting bug" in PHP's stream wrappers functionality - some strange 404 or 500 HTTP errors in one of his scripts.

I wrote a small script a while back that's gained a surprising amount of popularity thanks to a plug from the site that it posts to. [...] I learned that this [connection from the script] could be done with streams, I attempted to implement it in that fashion, but ran into strange issues where I would get 404 or 500-level HTTP errors rather than the response I was expected.

He eventually found the bug related to his problem (in the 5.2.x branch) but happily notes that it has been corrected and will be patched in the upcoming 5.3 (and 6) branches.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode 34 of their PHP Abstract podcast series from Manuel Lemos covering the abstraction of steams in a PHP application.

Today's special guest is Manuel Lemos of phpclasses.org Manuel is from Portugal and currently lives in Brazil where he works full-time on PHPClasses.org that he created in 1999. Today, Maunel is going to talk to us about Streams Abstraction.

Grab it in one of the usual three ways - listen on the page, download the mp3 or subscribe to feed for the show. Also, be sure to check out some of the other episodes listed at the bottom of the post for lots of other great content.

Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.

I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.

You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).