On PHP.net today they've announced the release of the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 5.5.x series - PHP 5.5.0RC2.

The PHP development team announces the availability of the second release candidate of PHP 5.5. This release fixes some bugs against RC1 and improves overall stability. [...] Please help us to identify bugs in order to ensure that the release is solid and all things behave as expected. Please test this release candidate against your code base and report any problems that you encounter to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker.

Issues corrected include a segfault when memory was used up, an issue with mbstring in PHPT tests in Windows x64 and a problem with custom exceptions. You can find the full list of changes in the NEWS file. Please download this latest release candidate (Windows here) and test it out on your systems.

On his site today Lukasz Kujawa has a post that compares some performance benchmarks of several popular PHP frameworks including Slim, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Symfony2 and Zend Framework 2.

There are many assumptions around performance of different PHP frameworks. I frequently hear strong opinions about superiority X over Y in this context. There are companies writing new PHP frameworks from scratch because available solutions are too slow for them. What does it really mean? Does the framework performance matters? Before answering this questions lets check how slow is your framework!

He took the "quick start" projects provided for each of the examples and ran some tests with the Apache Benchmark (ab) tool against EC2 instances, all configured the same way. The results weren't overly surprising with Slim beating the others hands down (it's a micro-framework after all) and Kohana and CodeIgniter coming in second and third. The frameworks with more overhead like Zend Framework and Symfony ranked some of the slowest.

On 7PHP.com there's a new post that interviews a PHP community member, Eric Hogue, about his experience with the Zend Certified Engineer exam.

This is the 3rd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

He starts off with some general questions to Eric about the exam and its structure and how he prepared himself for it. He mentions some of the resources he used to study and what kind of topics to pay attention to. There's also a few quotes included at the end giving another perspective on the exam (specifically, some frustrations).

In a new post to PHPMaster.com today, Rakhitha Nimesh takes a look at Faker, a tool that can be used to generate random test case data as a part of your workflow.

Testing is an iterative part of the development process that we carry out to ensure the quality of our code. A large portion of this entails writing test cases and testing each unit of our application using random test data. Actual data for our application comes in when we release it to production, but during the development process we need fake data similar to real data for testing purposes. The popular open source library Faker provides us with the ability to generate different data suitable for a wide range of scenarios.

Faker uses built-in data providers like "Person", "Company", "DateTime" and "UserAgent" to give you randomized output from the data sets you define. Code is included showing how to create the provider in your objects, extending the correct provider and making a request for a property. A real-world example is also included about testing an email marketing engine for address, title, name and content. There's also a little bit added at the end showing how you can increase the randomness of the results returned by "seeding" the Faker engine.

7PHP.com has posted a new article where they asked Lorna Mitchell for some of her advice for those wanting to take the Zend Certified Engineer exam, including what the test is like and how you can prepare effectively.

This is the 2nd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

They start with a little background on her and her experience with PHP and get quickly into the questions about the exam. Topics include things like:

• What the test is about and hopes to achieve
• Some things you can do to prepare
• A recommendation to make the most of your time exploring topics you might be weak in
• Whether or not the ZCE training classes help in the learning process

You can read the rest of the interview here.

On PHP.net today they've announced the tagging and release of the latest alpha for the PHP 5.5.0 series - PHP 5.5.0 alpha4:

The PHP development team announces the release of PHP 5.5.0alpha4. This release fixe some bugs from alpha3 and add some new features. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

There's new improvements included in this non-production release including class name resolution with "class" keyword and the DateTimeImmutable class. You can see the NEWS file for the complete list of changes. If you'd like to help test it out, you can download the preview release here (or here for Windows users).

If you'd like to help with testing for the upcoming PHP 5.5.0 version, they've announced the release of the latest alpha on the PHP.net site, ready for download and test execution.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.0alpha2. This release adds new features and fix some bugs from alpha1. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

You can see the full list of the changes in 5.5.0 (so far) in the NEWS file including things like using empty on return values, enabling systemtap by default for dtrace probes and optimized variable accessing. They need your help to make this upcoming release even better, so if you'd like to help out and test, go grab the download (Windows builds).

In a recent post to his site, Brandon Savage has a few helpful hints to keep in mind when you're refactoring your applications to make them easier to maintain (and possibly perform better) in the future.

The downtime [of this week] provides a perfect opportunity for the aspiring software developer to do the one thing they are always told there's no time to do: make the code better for better's sake. With few deadlines and plenty of free time, most developers can get a few hours of refactoring in to their code towards the end of the year. They can rearchitect sections that were implemented with haste in September; they can write tests for sections that were untested in April. Put another way, the "lost week" can be redeemed.

He has a few recommendations, each including their own brief summary:

• Test Everything First
• One Method, One Job (Also One Class, One Job)
• Don't Be Afraid Of More Objects And Classes
• Remove Dead, Unused, Unnecessary or Old Code
• Document Your Code

Check out the full post for the summaries and links to other useful resources.

In his recent post Gonzalo Ayuso shows how to use Symfony to work with Windows services on the server.

Sometimes I need to stop/start remote Windows services with PHP. It's quite easy to do it with net commnand. This command is a tool for administration of Samba and remote CIFS servers. [...] Today we are going to create a PHP wrapper for [net rpc service].

He uses Behat to create a feature (test) file, the code behind the features and a service class that handles the actual work of interacting with the service (with methods to do things like stop, start and list running services). Examples of its use are also included.

In this new post to his site Matt Frost continues his look at using Selenium to test his applications (see the first parts here) and shows how to use the Selenium extension for PHPUnit to run all his tests from one place.

So I've taken it upon myself to do a bit of reading and messing around with the Selenium Extension for PHPUnit and I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. Looking around on the internet, I didn't find a whole lot of real good information on the Selenium2TestCase API so I want to provide a little bit of depth in some of those areas. I'm going to cover a few areas of interest and provide some code examples where relevant.

He includes the steps to get things set up to connect with the Selenium server and some of the common functions you can use to interact with its browser. He shows how to select items and interact with things like forms and links. He also includes a recommendation of using the "url()" method to jump to a point in the app instead of clicking through the same paths over and over again.