In Case You Missed It...The Month of January 2007

Many in the PHP blogosphere provided us with their respective takes on 2006; some were more personal than others, but all were interesting to read. Derick Rethans provides us with probably the most popular wrap-up of PHP in 2006, but there are others that are worthy of a good read (in no particular order):

• Andrew Van der Stock
• Chris Shiflett
• Wez Furlong
• Laura Thomson
• Ligaya Turmelle
• Greg Beaver
• Davey Shafik
• Sara Golemon
• Aaron Wormus
• Andi Gutmans

I'm always impressed at the level of detail these bloggers are able to provide us about the year that has passed--heck, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast.

Harold Goldberg joined Zend as their new CEO, so we learned from the official press release from Zend. He comes to Zend from BMC Software, and undoubtedly brings to the table exciting and visionary times for the Zend corporation. Congratulations to him and best wishes to all the folks at Zend.

PHPClasses.org announced the winner of the "Innovation Award" for January 2007. Congratulations go out to Khaled Al-Shamaa for his ArDate class. This class formats dates and times in Arabic and it can be seen at http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3591.html. For his work with this class, Khaled gets a free copy of Zend Studio (woot!). If you aren't familiar with PHPClasses.org, it's a repository of classes available for the use by the general PHP public.

Although it's obviously still in development, some of you early adapters who want to start messing around with it can now easily install PHP6 on your machine, thanks to a quick tutorial from David Coallier's blog. In his blog, he goes through what you'll need prior to installing, and each of the steps. The post is not for the faint of heart however, as was noted in the comments, but if you're feeling brave and have nothing better to do, then go for it. Thanks for the tip, David!

This year's edition of the one-day PHP London/UK conference has been announced--it will take place on February 23, 2007 at Keyworth Centre in central London. For £50, you can hear speakers like Rasmus Lerdorf, Cal Evans, Simon Laws, Bill Gaver and Kevlin Henney. A great deal, I must say. If you find yourself in that part of the world, why not sign up and check it out? For more info, go to the conference home page at http://www.phpconference.co.uk/.

phpMyAdmin 2.9.2 Released

Greg Beaver let us know that Mac OS X systems are shipping with PEAR 1.3.6 (an old version, and one that has some security bugs in it). If you've gotten a new Mac, you'll need to upgrade immediately. Check out Greg's blog for more info, or the PEAR website.

The folks at php|architect have announced their latest and greatest conference, php|tek 2007, is to be held May 16-18 in Chicago, Illinois. The speakers include the usual suspects (and some newer faces too): Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski, Aaron Wormus, Adam Trachtenberg, Joe Stagner, Sara Golemon, Jeff Moore, Ilia Alshanetsky, Jason Sweat, Paul Reinheimer, Chris Shiflett, Davey Shafik, Sebastian Bergmann, Wez Furlong, Derick Rethans, John Coggleshall, Marcus Boerger, Lukas Smith, Chris Hartjes, Mike Potter, Rich Bowen, Caroline Maynard, Mac Newbold, Jay Pipes, Eli White, and Kitman Cheung. Wow! Talk about a star-studded lineup! For more information, you are encouraged to check out the php|architect website--the sooner the better. The first 50 attendees will get a voucher for a free online training course as well.

The first annual PHP Throwdown took place on January 27, 2007. This 24-hour coding competition had over 100 teams signed up to see who could code the coolest app in 24 hours. While many didn't have the stomach for it when it came right down to it, there were many excellent apps that were submitted. The organizers (read: me) are still sorting through all the submissions and will be sending them along to the panel of celebrity judges very soon. Good luck to all those who competed!

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:

• Console_ProgressBar 0.5.0beta
• Structures_Graph 1.0.3
• DB 1.7.8
• Games_Chess 1.0.0
• DB_QueryTool 1.1.0
• MDB_QueryTool 1.2.0
• Services_Blogging 0.1.0
• Gtk2_ExceptionDump 1.0.0
• Console_Color 1.0.2
• File_MARC 0.1.1
• Text_Wiki_Cowiki 0.0.2
• HTML_CSS 1.1.2
• HTML_Progress2 2.2.0
• Net_MAC 0.1.1
• Text_CAPTCHA_Numeral 1.0.0RC2
• PHP_Archive 0.9.1
• pearweb 1.1.5
• HTML_QuickForm_advmultiselect 1.3.0
• PHP_Archive 0.9.2
• pearweb 1.1.6
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.4
• Structures_Graph 1.0.2
• DB 1.7.7
• PEAR 1.5.0RC3
• HTML_QuickForm_advmultiselect 1.3.1
• XML_Feed_Parser 1.0.1
• MDB2_Driver_mssql 1.1.1
• Net_IMAP 1.1.0beta1
• Structures_BibTex 1.0.0RC1
• MDB2_Driver_mssql 1.1.2
• Structures_BibTex 1.0.0RC2
• PEAR_PackageUpdate 0.6.0
• PHP_CodeSniffer 0.3.0
• DB 1.7.8RC1
• HTML_QuickForm_CAPTCHA 0.2.1
• XML_RPC2 1.0.0
• Structures_DataGrid 0.8.1
• Auth 1.5.0RC1
• HTML_Progress2 2.3.0a1
• Net_MPD 1.0.0
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.5
• Console_Table 1.0.6
• DB 1.7.8RC2
• SOAP_Interop 0.8.1
• File_PDF 0.2.0
• HTML_Progress2 2.3.0a2
• SOAP 0.10.0
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.5
• SOAP 0.10.1
• pearweb 1.1.7
• PEAR 1.5.0
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.6
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.6
• Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_Array 0.1.2
• Structures_BibTex 1.0.0RC3

And for PECL, we had:

• Xdebug 2.0.0RC3
• zip 1.8.5
• pecl_http 1.4.1
• cairo_wrapper 0.2.2
• oci8 1.2.3
• pecl_http 1.4.0
• pecl_http 1.4.0RC2
• zip 1.9.0
• mcve 5.2.1
• htscanner 0.6.3
• zip 1.8.4
• Parse_Tree 0.1.4

As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net and http://pecl.php.net.

We'll see you next month with our news and tidbits from the PHP World!