Richard Heyes has pointed out an interesting little app that Lucas Baltes created to visually show the timeline of PHP releases from now back.

The timeline stretches all the way from the current PHP 5 release (bye bye PHP 4) back to some of the initial releases Rasmus made as the "PHP Tools version 1.0" back in 1995. Each entry is timestamped with when it was released and some of the more recent ones have "tails" showing how long their life lasted.

Lucas also links to the museum on the PHP.net website where all of these versions can be downloaded.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial (login required) showing how to use the Eclipse PDT functionality to debug scripts your PHP development.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

You'll need to have a machine with PHP, Eclipse, Apache and the PHP Development Tools already installed to follow along (as well as a trial version of the Zend Studio Web Debugger). They also include the methods for setting up XDebug as the debugger.

Mike Naberezny has start up a new resource to try to bridge some of the gap between PHP and Ruby and to help developers of either to get a bit more insight into the others' side - Rails for PHP Developers (based on the book published by the Pragmatic Programmers).

Rails for PHP Developers is a new site for PHP developers who are also interested in Rails and Ruby. PHP and Ruby are great complementary tools that are sometimes seen as adversarial, which is really unfortunate. We use both and we'll be writing regular articles to help cross-pollinate ideas and promote collaboration between the communities.

There's already some good content there - useful perlisms in ruby, a look at PHP object attributes and some information about the release of the site itself.

Kore Nordmann has posted a new article series (to the "Articles" section of his site) with six different pieces talking about different aspects of image creation with PHP:

• Image creation with PHP - Image Tools
• Image creation with PHP - Text rendering
• Image creation with PHP - Integrating bitmaps
• Image creation with PHP - Gradient rendering
• Image creation with PHP - A first shape
• Image creation with PHP - Formats & Libraries

Each of them can be read separately, but they're all part of a series and make more sense when read together.

The Eclipse Project (who recently announced, in conjunction with Zend, the release of the PHP IDE PDT 1.0) are putting on a live webinar covering the software and its release.

This webinar will include a short history about the PHP Development Tools framework project, some statistical information (downloads, committers, bugs) and a demonstration of the project. The demonstration includes the different perspectives (PHP and PHP Debug) and the different views under each perspective. We will go through the creation of a PHP project, a PHP file and a debug session, where we will illustrate the debug features. During the presentation we will also see the relations to the WTP project which the PHP project is based on.

The event will be happening October 2nd (2007) at 9am PDT/12pm EDT/4pm GMT and will run about an hour. To attend, head to the event's page and click on the "Register" button on the right.

In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).

I've been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, it's probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.

Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.

In a new entry to his blog today, Alexander Netkachev takes a look at the Eclipse project formerly known as "PHP IDE" - the "PDT, PHP Development Tools" project.

PHP IDE developers have changed the name of their project to PHP Development Tools, to place it into the line of Eclipse project Development Tools with C/C++ Development Tools, J Development Tools, and others. So, if you use PHP IDE in your work, do not forget to update it to the new version of the project with a few bugs fixed and new features added.

He also includes the instructions to make the update to this latest version and the screenshots of a before and after the update's run.

In this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about his meetup with Danny Kolke and Ahmad Baitalmal of Etelos where they recorded a great PHP-related conversation.

On the podcast we talked about Zend, PHP5 and Etelos' EASE programming language. For those of you not familiar with Etelos, here is a quick blurb from their web site.

Cal gave his impression of what Etelos is creating and an opinion on the quality, stating that Etelos/EASE looks phenomenal. Especially of note is Cal's comments about not needing a computer science degree to get a website up and running with a database backend.

It's always interesting to get an outsider's perspective on the language that we all work with and love (or hate, just depends on how debugging's going). In his latest blog post, Chris Justis does just that with some of his comments from an interview with IEEE magazine about why Java will outlive PHP.

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by an IEEE magazine in February to comment on the demise of Java (vs. PHP). A 45-minute interview turned into a paragraph in the article, but I thought that I might put all of my thoughts up on my blog.

There's some interesting ideas here, but I'm not sure that most of them mean the "victory" of Java over PHP. In fact, most of them seem to reinforce the thought that PHP and Java will coexist happily for a good long while.

The International PHP Magazine has posted this week's poll results for their question "What's the biggest advantage of PHP5?"

The choices for this poll were "Performance", "Easy to work with", "Being web-like", "Varied choice of tools", "It has good community back up", "None". Coming out on top was the performance factor with a vote percentage of 20.3%. Next on the list was that it was easy to work with at 15.2%. And, coming in at number three (just barely) - the varied choice of tools that it offers.

They have a new poll up this week too, with a timely question on a topic a lot of PHP developers are working with right now - "Which is the Most Common Design Pattern?" Head on over and cast your vote today!