Many things have been floating around with regards to PHP 6.0, and I'll do my best to tread lightly on this topic as it's
obviously very far from being released, and there is much discussion yet to be had. The issues that are being discussed include the support for Unicode characters, the
removal of PEAR and a few other issues mostly to address security concerns.
Rasmus Lerdorf posted his wish list on the php internals development list with some pretty radical suggestions (at least as far as BC goes) -
http://news.php.net/php.internals/17883. If you'd like to keep up
with the development of PHP 6.0, you can visit
http://news.php.net/php.internals.
There is another vulnerability with PEAR's XML-RPC (details can be seen at Secunia's site:
http://secunia.com/advisories/16431/).You are encouraged to upgrade to version 1.4, which is available at
http://pear.php.net/package/XML_RPC/download/. This version fixes this
vulernability by removing the use of eval() and it also addresses a backward compatibility bug.
Alan has blogged about a new XUL HTML editor he whipped up for the general public to use.You can download it directly from
http://www.akbkhome.com/svn/XUL/HtmlEdit/ or you can read more about it (including
detailed installation instructions) at his blog entry:
http://www.akbkhome.com/blog.php/View/99/Remote_XUL_Html_Editor.html.
I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:
- Net_SMPP_Client 0.3.2 - SMPP v3.4 client
- Net_SMPP 0.4.3 - SMPP v3.4 protocol implementation
- Contact_AddressBook 0.4.0alpha1 - Address book export-import class
- File_Archive 1.5.3 - File_Archive will let you manipulate easily the tar, gz, tgz, bz2, tbz, zip, ar (or deb) files
- Text_Diff 0.1.0 - Engine for performing and rendering text diffs
- LiveUser 0.16.4 - User authentication and permission management framework
- XML_RPC 1.4.0 - PHP implementation of the XML-RPC protocol
- Services_DynDNS 0.3.1 - Provides access to the DynDNS web service
- Net_IDNA 0.7.1 - Punycode encoding and decoding.
- Payment_Process 0.6.2 - Unified payment processor
And for PECL, we had:
- APC - Alternative PHP Cache
- DTrace - A Solaris Dtrace provider
- ingres - Extension for CA's Ingres database.
- sdo - Service Data Objects (SDOs) for PHP
As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net/ and http://pecl.php.net/.