Pongal releases sink!
230294
Gossip from the film industry down south.
359849
Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.   Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.   He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.
758891
Sunny Deol's new action-adventure turns out to be a damp squib.
649335
Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
512996
Today, Pierre-Alain Joye has fomally announced his "retirement" from working with the PEAR project as a lead developer. He's making a shift to work mainly towards other graphics/imaging work he's been developing and to continue work with his current extensions (and a few new ones on the way).   I spoke with him on some of the things that had lead up to making this decision and he mentioned it as a two-fold reason: one was some personal conflict between other PEAR developers and himself and the other an issue of time and interest in the project. He still wants to see it succeed, but just doesn't see the time in his life right now to do his part. Pierre will continue to work with the PECL extensions and on the PHP internals groups to help improve and develope them towards future versions. Some of the extensions he lists as the ones currently in his development are things like GD, xmlwriter, Zip (of course), and filter.   It is just a normal process, things and people change. I would have preferred a slower switch, as I was working on my leave (giving lead for many of my packages to other friends).   Pierre's PEAR work can be seen on this page of his blog and includes all of his PEAR and PECL work as well as PHP internals and Pimp/Cairo/GD development work.   You can also check out the decision in his own words over on his blog.
607105
Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
349589
Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
692223
Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
145484
Tycho:  Gabriel's ill-conceived Pong Pong challenge has brought out the wolves, and now the forest rings with their baying. Amaze Entertainment is holding tryouts internally to see who will leave our merry band in ruins. Upstarts from the DigiPen Institute of Technology will arrive soon to unseat the last generation as is the charge of all young men. "Suckerpunch" will cease to be a euphemism when one of their usually mild animators suddenly strikes my diaphragm.
218405
About two years ago you may remember we were in the throes of the SOAP revolution. "Web services everywhere!" was the cry and have to confess I'm one of those guilty of having gone for it, for a while. There were going to be these giant UDDI servers that would aggregate everyone's web services and the Internet would never look the same again...
496780
Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
313520
In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
372430
Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager for the current PHP5 series, has announced the posting of the latest release canidate - PHP 5.2.0. RC4.   Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.   You can grab the files here:  BZipped GZipped
362505
On Pierre's blog today, there's a release announcement about the "long awaited for" version of his Filter extension - version 0.1.0.0.   This release will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0RC3, which is likely to be the last RC. Please report any trouble you find, and post your feedback (here, on the pecl-dev mailing list or in the issue tracker), it will help provide the best possible extension in the 5.2.0 release. A stable filter release should still hit the road this year.   Feature additons for this release include an input_get_args method, support for PHP's pcre expressions, JIT support, and support for custom decimal spacers. Several behaviors were changed as well, including when a value is FALSE or NULL, updates to the integer/float parser, and the default filter now being set to "raw".   You can get the complete listing of updates on the project from the Changelog and check out the project and all of its documentation on it's PECL homepage.
238103
In his latest post, Greg Beaver gets excited about some of the recent advancements in PEAR including: more traffic on the mailing lists, improvements to the acceptance policies and documentation for packages, and fun things like the download statistics and a Google Map of developers.    His real excitement comes with the latest offering the PEAR group is creating to pull more of the PHP community into the project and make them feel a part - a new election interface to vote on packages and the future of PEAR.   Most of the important decisions I mentioned will be decided by a general election, meaning that the users of PEAR, not just the developers, will have a voice in the direction PEAR decides to take.   PEAR developers out there are already registered to vote, but if you'd like to get in on the action, head over to the signup form and get involved today.
651079
Until the 17th of December, that is, when Swades releases. Ashutosh likes it that way.
481408
Latest PEAR Releases:Net_Wifi 1.0.0PEAR_PackageFileManager_Cli 0.2.1Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Flexy 0.1.3Mail_Mime 1.5.1Net_LDAP 1.0.0RC1Testing_FIT 0.2.0pearweb_index 1.16.6pearweb_index 1.16.5UDDI 0.2.4Mail_Mime 1.5.2pearweb_index 1.16.7Image_Canvas 0.3.1Benchmark 1.2.7PEAR 1.6.1Tree 0.3.1pearweb 1.16.1