In Case You Missed It...The Week of November 14th, 2005

More PHP Conferences have come to an end, and as usual many speakers have posted their slides for our viewing pleasure:

International PHP Conference 2005:

• Ilia Alshanetsky ("PHP Security Talk," "PHP 5 OOP", "PHP & Performance") - http://ilia.ws/archives/90-Frankfurt-Conference.html
• Sebastian Bergmann ("Propel - Objekt-Relationales Mapping mit PHP 5" & "PHPUnit - Testgetriebene Entwicklung mit PHP 5") - http://www.sebastian-bergmann.de/en/talks.php
• Jeremy Johnstone ("PHP & Ajax", "PHP & Java in the Enterprise", & "PHP & Gtk+ 2.6") - http://jeremyjohnstone.com/blog/
• Derick Rethans ("Unicode and PHP" & "How PHP Ticks") - http://www.derickrethans.nl/talks.php
• Tobias Schlitt ("News from PEAR" & "Distribute PHP Applications with PEAR") - http://www.schlitt.info/applications/blog/
• Lukas Smith ("Relational Databases Starter Day," "Fast, Portable SQL Pts I & II," "PEAR Hands On") - http://pooteeweet.org/slides
• Markus Wolff ("Applikationsintegration mit PHP5 " & " PHP, AJAX und XUL im Intranet ")
• Aaron Wormus ("Win32 GUI Development with PHP and Winbinder") - http://www.wormus.com/aaron/

There is also a collective photo album available at http://www.flickr.com/groups/international_php_conference_2005/ if you'd like to see some action shots, or if you have a few of your own to upload. As well, if you thought it would be cool to be a fly on the wall at the conference, Aaron Wormus has put together a podcast of the sounds of the conference, available for download at http://media.eckspee.com/podcasts/2005-11-06_Aaron-Wormus.mp3. A nice summary has also been posted at ThinkPHP's site: http://blog.thinkphp.de/.

AFUP Conference:

• Rasmus Lerdorf (Keynote) - http://talks.lerdorf.com/show/afup05
• Wez Furlong (PDO) - http://netevil.org/talks/PHP-Data-Objects.pdf

Zend has announced their release of Zend Studio 5 in stable version. Enhancements include:

• Web Services Support
• Subversion Integration
• Code Folding
• Go to PHP Resource Utility
• FTP over SSL Support
• Internet Explorer Integration
• Nested PHP Code Completion

As always, you can check it out through the free trial: http://www.zend.com/store/evaluation.php?pid=77.

Just a reminder, MySQL AB is hosting a free webinar on their site: The Fastest and Easiest Way to Get Started with MySQL 5.0. This is to be held on November 15, and to register, go to http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/.

Chris Cornutt has 2 new podcasts posted at Pro-PHP (http://www.pro-php.com). They're quick, informative, and certainly an interesting listen. The first is a news highlight of recent PHP goings-on (should I say that here?) and the second is a peek into the Zend Certification Exam, from a fellow developer.

PHPCommunity has released its third edition of The Gazette, an informative newsletter with articles on a variety of topics. In particular, this edition covers email validation with PEAR::Validate, an introduction to MySQL administration, some cool things you can do with arrays, and more. To check it out go to http://www.phpcommunity.org/node/214 (great job, guys!).

With some cool new features, and many bug fixes, the developers of this essential piece of your toolkit encourage you to download and give it a try (but of course not in a production environment). Go get it at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php#2.7.0-beta1.

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

• Event_Dispatcher 1.0.0 - Dispatch notifications using PHP callbacks
• PHPUnit2 2.3.3 - Regression testing framework for unit tests.
• PHPUnit 1.3.2 - Regression testing framework for unit tests.
• PEAR_RemoteInstaller 0.2.0 - PEAR Remote installation plugin through FTP
• Text_Wiki 1.0.3 - Abstracts parsing and rendering rules for any markup as Wiki or BBCode in structured plain text.
• Image_Canvas 0.2.4 - A package providing a common interface to image drawing, making image source code independent on the library used
• Contact_AddressBook 0.5.0 - Address book export-import class
  

And for PECL, we had:

expect	PHP extension for expect library
gnupg	wrapper around the gpgme library
ibm_db2	Extension for IBM DB2 Universal Database, IBM Cloudscape, and Apache Derby
mcve	libmonetra/libmcve interface
tidy	Tidy HTML Repairing and Parsing
win32ps	Win32 process and memory stats
win32ps_dll	Win32 process and memory stats

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!