Greg Beaver's Blog: Update to libxml2 in PHP - progress hath been acquired
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Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.   Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.   The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:XmlArraygoogleSiteMapMultiAjaxXMLTreeXMLPHPLoggerImage Uploaderpop3-streamUserAction
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Pierre-Alain Joye ha posted some great news about the Zip PECL package today on his blog - it's finally reached stable.   Zip is stable since two releases. I lacked the time to report it :) Three bugs were important. Once PHP 5.2.0 is out, I will focus on the new features. Write stream support, unicode (php6+ support), pattern based addition/extraction and crypting functions.   The three bugs he mentions were a problem with zipArchive::addFile, comment/cdir problems with new archives, and setting properties in extended classes.   You can check out the homepage for the project here or just view the Changelog for complete updates.
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For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.   The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.   The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.
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Derick Rethans has posted a new item to his blog about the release of the popular PHP debugging software's latest version XDebug 2.0.1.   This version comes with a few bug fixes but the main thing is greatly improved performance of Xdebug's Code Coverage functionality. To give an idea on what kind of improvement I'm talking, I am including very rough benchmark results.   He describes the benchmarks and gives the results - without code coverage and the pre/post of this new version (2.0.0 versus 2.0.1). The results are very impressive.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHPClasses.org: File upload progress meter for PHP 4, at last!Zend Developer Zone: Zend Framework Preview Release 0.6.0 AnnouncedIBM developerWorks: Generate Flash movies on the fly with PHPMike Bernat's Blog: Creating a Simple Registration Script using PHPphp|architect: An overview of the CakePHP frameworkPHPBuilder.com: Reading RSS feeds in PHP: Part 2The Bakery Blog: SwiftMailer Component TutorialPHP-GTK Community Site: Merry Christmas (A Holiday Widget)Ben Ramsey's Blog: Installing the Eclipse PHP IDEZend Developer Zone: Zend Studio 5.5 WalkthroughCommunity News: Vancouver PHP Conference 2007Edin Kadribasic's Blog: BenchmarksJSLabs Blog:  phpBB 3...is it worth the wait?Christopher Jones' Blog: Installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu with PHPChris Chabot's Blog: phpSocketDaemon
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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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On his blog today, Ilia Alshanetsky has posted an update on one of the last issues before PHP 5.2 is released - the Filter extension - and some of the problems that have surrounded it.    If you have been monitoring PHP's internal mailing list you probably know that over the last few weeks we've been locked in a stalemate in regard to the API revision of the filter extension brought to light by Dan from our documentation team. This is also the reason why despite this being early October PHP 5.2 is still not out.    Fortunately, after mediation with Derick and Pierre the two protagonists of the filter conundrum a compromised was finally reached.    He mentions the commit that was made to include it into the current build, and no complaints have been lodged against it. He also comments that, with this isse out of the way, developers can look for PHP 5.2RC5 out as soon as this Thursday (10.05.06). Ilia also gives a brief tour of the filter extension's functions.
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The latest release of PHP in the PHP 5.2.x series has been posted for download to the main PHP website today - version 5.2.3.   The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.   Updates in this new version include many security fixes and enhancements - check out the Changelog for complete information.   Check out other comments on the release from Ilia Alshanetsky and Stefan Esser.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 1Developer.com: Threads Versus The Singleton PatternNick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHPDevShed: PHP, MySQL and the PEAR DatabaseDave Dash's Blog: Installing a PHP that can do symfony+doctrine on DreamhostChristopher Jones' Blog: Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on LinuxPHP.net: PHP 5.2.3 ReleasedPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for May 31st, 2007Secunia.com: PHP Integer Overflow Vulnerability and Security BypassPHPBuilder.com: PHP and Regular Expressions 101
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Tim Koschuetzki has created and posted a new tutorial today that talks about working with XML documents with PHP's DOM Library (the PHP5 version) to create, query and update current documents.   The PHP 4 DOMXML extension has undergone some serious transformation since PHP5 and is a lot easier to use. Unlike SimpleXML, DOM can, at times, be cumbersome and unwieldy. However, it is often a better choice than SimpleXML. Please join me and find out why.   He breaks it out into a few different tasks - saving documents, using XPath queries, updating the contents of an XML file, working with namespaces and playing nice with SimpleXML.
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Ilia Alshanetsky has an announcement on his blog today about the release of the next candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.2 series - PHP 5.2.0RC5.    After 2 weeks of inaction 5.2.0 final release is finally in sight. A few minutes ago I've released the last (I mean it this time) release candidate of 5.2.0, RC5. If all goes well a week from now 5.2.0 final will be out ready for use. In the meantime I'd like to ask once again that everyone try this RC, which can downloaded from here.   I don't think you'd be able to find any major issues or regressions in this RC, but if you do certainly let me know, if necessary RC6 is not out of the question.    The more this new release is downloaded and tested, the faster we all get PHP 5.2 - so get out there and get testing!   The Windows builds have also already been created courtesy of Edin Kadribasic.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Antony Dovgal has pointed out the updated packages that have been released to the snaps.php.net website by Derick Rethans.   He also includes a list of things that will be included in this upcoming release like:   Namespaces Late static binding Accessing static members through $foo::myFunc() Improved OpenSSL extension PCRE 7.4   Grab your copy of these latest snapshots from the snaps website and get to testing them on your system to see what happens before the release.
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I was reading LWN where there were reports of security holes in a dozen different packages based off Mozilla's Gecko. Someone complained about the lack of a universal library that they should all use so that users would only need to update the library and not each program separately. Apparently such a library exists as libxul, but its use is uncommon enough that the bugs were reported as being for the several separate programs and not for "libxul".
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:DeveloperTutorials.com: AJAX and PHP Form ProcessingPHPRiot.com: Monitoring File Uploads using Ajax and PHPCommunity News: Has Smarty's Time Come?Deasil.com: Lessons to be learned from PHPIan Bicking's Blog: What PHP Deployment Gets RightDaniel Crook's Blog: Mashups from IBM at NYPHP in JanuaryMike Naberezny's Blog:  Horde/Yaml 1.0 ReleasedMikko Koppanen's Blog: Padding thumbnail with colorRichard Lord's Blog: If you want to create AVM2 swfs from PHPZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Episode 31: Book Review - Sitepoint's PHP Anthology, 2nd Ed.
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Ilia Alshanetsky has noted that the latest release canidate for the PHP 5.2.x series, PHP 5.2.5RC1, is now available for download.   This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.   You can download this new edition directly from here (no Windows builds yet).