Tony Bibbs' Blog:  The Problem with PHP is PHP Itself
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According to Tony Bibbs, PHP's real problem is itself.:   So what do I mean when I say PHP's problem is PHP itself? [...] One word. Sustainability.   He suggests that, while PHP has made a big splash in the areas it's hit, it is still tripping over its own feet. PHP, the language, can meet the needs of just about any sort of web development that might come down the line, but when good PHP developers are so hard to find, why should any organization bother with working it into their technology stack?   Comments on the article responds to the "chicken and egg situation" Tony has presented and how things like user groups can help stoke the fires of PHP's presence in not only the budding web developers but also in the professionals looking to expand their horizons.
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Scott Mattocks is back with the latest installment of the PHP-GTK news, issue number 22.   It's been a while, but I finally have some time to get back to summing up the world of PHP-GTK. Things have slowed down a little in the past few months on the development side but that doesn't mean that the world of PHP-GTK 2 has stood still.   In this edition, there's a call for help for anyone that would want to join the other (4!) developers in working on the PHP-GTK 2 project as well as some general information about the project and its involvement in the community - from talks at php/db|works, International PHP Conference, and the Zend/PHP Conference to the many PHP-GTK-related articles being printed to a new online resource for PHP-GTK tutorials.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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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.
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According to Gopal Vijayaraghavan, PHP developers "don't really understand PHP":   They know how to use PHP - but they hardly know how it works, mainly because it Just Works most of the time. But such willful ignorance (otherwise known as abstraction) often runs them aground on some issues when their code meets the stupidity that is APC.   To illustrate, he talks about how a simple bit of functionality in PHP, includes, really work. He describes how they're handled (evaluated at run time) and how the APC relates to this process.   He presents a dilemma where classes are created in two different ways (inside and outside included files) and a problem that could cause the APC caching to not cache a file at all after a certain point. He even gives an example of how, in "normal code" and a pretty basic development situation, this sort of thing could happen.
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Krystian Hoffman has posted to his blog today a few reasons (10 to be exact) that he likes and uses PHP. Fortunately, most of them are some of the best reasons for anyone to use the language.   ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren't really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.  Here's some of his list:   The PHP Community The (language's) Performance Its Portability It has strong Object-oriented support   Other things got a mention as well - the low learning curve, low cost, included libraries - but the above few seemed the strongest.
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it:
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.   Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.   He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review for one of Sams Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings, "PHP 5 In Practice" by Elliott "Eli" White III (Senior Programmer over at digg.com.   First let me say, if you are new to PHP or programming in general, skip this book. This is not a how to or even a cookbook for simple concepts. To get the most from this book you need to have a firm grounding in programming.   He sets the tone for the rest of the interview right there, noting that most of the book is made up of little examples, helpful bits to fill a need rather than teaching you the basics (or more advanced features) of PHP as a language. Cal spotlights this kind of content by talking about the "binary tree implementation" section. Check out the rest of the review for the full story.
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of one of Packt Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings - "PHP Programming with PEAR".    For those who have been living under a virtual rock for a while now, PEAR is the "PHP Extension and Application Repository". In a nutshell, it is a collection of classes, it's a framework, and it's a distribution system. Most importantly though, it's an excellent place to find the classes you need so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. (Ok, beginner's time is over, I promise).   PHP Programming with PEAR, written by Stephen Schmidt, Carsten Lucke, Stoyan Stefanov and Aaron Wormus, takes a look at some important PEAR classes and how you can use them.     He mentions what the book covers (which packages) and highlights some of his favorite bits, including the chapter on web services.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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As mentioned by Richard Heyes, there's a new blog post from Larry Garfield talking about the death of PHP4, how the community has responded to it and some of his own thoughts on the matter.   The problem is the source for that "everyone" [is still using PHP4] claim. The most widely referenced stats are the Nexen stats, and according to them 70%+ of the world still uses PHP 4. Horrors!   He takes a closer look at the stats and comes up with a slightly different sort of conclusion that the stats can't really measure. They can show the server-based usage measurements of PHP4 vs PHP5, but they can't show the number of developers behind each of them.  According to Larry:  Even if we assume that 70% of PHP developers are using 70% of random servers running PHP, and that they're all using proprietary, one-off applications on a server with a sysadmin who refuses to upgrade at a company that has no support contract with any distribution vendor... Where are they?
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PHPKitchen has an interesting post covering one of the banes of most web developers existance - the "back button problem".