In Case You Missed It... The Week of June 27, 2005

by: Elizabeth Naramore

June 28, 2005

This week we saw:

Sad News for the Web Standards and Open Source Movement

Nigel McFarlane passed away last week, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. He was the author of numerous books and articles on Mozilla and was an active contributor to the project. He was also an outspoken advocate of the importance of Web Standards and was a member of the Web Standards Group. Mr. McFarlane's work also appeared regularly in the Syndey Morning Herald's technology section and The Age. For more information, or to pay your own tribute to this dedicated and talented young man, you can visit the mozillaZine website at http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6842.

Security Advisory for PHP-Nuke

Secunia has issued a security advisory for PHP-Nuke involving the use of off-site avatars. Apparently malicious users can insert HTML code instead of a valid link to an image, and cause undesired effects, needless to say. To read more about this yet unpatched alert, visit http://secunia.com/advisories/15829/.

PHP 5.1.0 Beta 2 Released

You now have a new "toy" to play with in the recent beta 2 release of PHP 5.1.0. Numerous improvements await you, including (from the php.net site):

PDO (PHP Data Objects) - A new native database abstraction layer providing performance, ease-of-use, and flexibility.
Significantly improved language performance mainly due to the new Zend Engine II execution architecture.
The PCRE extension has been updated to PCRE 5.0.
Many more improvements including lots of new functionality & many bug fixes, especially in regards to SOAP, streams and SPL.

It can be downloaded at http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v5.1.

In related news, in a recent blog post, Ilia Alshanetsky gives us a heads-up that PHP 5.1.0 b2 will offer a way to toggle query buffering in MySQL queries using the PDO_MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY parameter in the PDO class. For the full scoop, check out Ilia's full post at http://ilia.ws/archives/53-PDO_MySQL-Buffered-Query-Support.html.

phpBB 2.0.16 Released

This latest release carries some bug fixes and a security update, so you should probably be downloading and installing as soon as possible. To read the full list of bug fixes and how to fix a security hole, read the developer's post at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=302011. To download the package, go to http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php.

ThinkPHP Launches ThinkPHPPress

The developers at thinkphp.de have announced that they are starting a new venture; Thinkphp Press. This new series of books will focus on using PHP at the enterprise level. According to the blog, "You can expect high level information with best practice usage inside large Enterprise PHP applications." For more information, you can visit the thinkphp.de website: http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/54-Announcing-ThinkPHP-Press.html.

Zend Collaborates with PayPal on SOAP

Zend announced this week that they had collaborated with PayPal in the development of PEAR::SOAP version 0.90. According to the press release, "PEAR::SOAP version 0.90 updated many previously known issues and vastly improved the module's WSDL and namespace support. By giving these improvements back to the PHP community, developers worldwide are better able to work with all Web Services from their PHP applications." Considering that 0.90 was released on May 30, 2005 (and subsequently version 0.91 as well), I'm not entirely sure why they decided to announce this collaboration a month later, but what do I know. At any rate, you can read all about it in their press release: http://www.zend.com/news/zendpr.php?id=102.

PEAR/PECL releases

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

DB_DataObject - An SQL Builder, Object Interface to Database Tables
DB_ldap - DB interface to LDAP server
File_Bittorrent - Decode and Encode data in Bittorrent format
HTML_Progress2 - How to include a loading bar in your XHTML documents quickly and easily.
HTML_QuickForm_adv - multiselect Element for HTML_QuickForm that emulate a multi-select.
LiveUser - User authentication and permission management framework
LiveUser_Admin - User authentication and permission management framework
Mail - Class that provides multiple interfaces for sending emails
PHPUnit2 - Regression testing framework for unit tests.
Services_ExchangeRates - Performs currency conversion
Services_Pingback - A Pingback User-Agent class.
>Text_Highlighter - Syntax highlighting

PECL was relatively inactive this week as there are no new releases to report.

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

See you next week with more news and tidbits from the PHP world!

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