This new post from Troels Knak-Nielsen on the SitePoint PHP blog shares a few helpful in-browser development tools that could come in handy in your day to day coding.

While debuggers exists, there isn't much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope.

Tools mentioned include traceers and error handlers (like XDebug), some debugging parts of the popular PHP frameworks and the set of *cachegrind tools to help you parse the output of XDebug for profiling your application.

Eirik Hoem has pointed out an online tool a coworker shared with him to work with regular expressions for multiple languages.

A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results.

The tool lets you put in the string you want to match again and the pattern you want to match with. The results are automatically populated below it, making it easy to fine-tune your expression to only what you want.

Continuing in his series looking at the construction of a blogging application with the Zend Framework, Padraic Brady has posted a quick new item pointing out the subversion repository for the project if you'd like to follow along:

You should all see a few commits commencing at the weekend. Probably all in one go since I largely have a standard skeleton I use already. [The URL is] http://svn.astrumfutura.org/zfblog/.

He's working live on it so things might break from time to time, but at least you can keep up with his thoughts and ideas on methods for some of the common blogging tasks.

You can find the first two parts of the series here - Part 1 and Part 2

Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.

Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.

He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.