AMFPHP recent updates

Well, after a long time without any news it seems now we’re close to different updates about AMFPHP.

As you probably know Wade Arnold took the place of Patrick some time ago as project leader but no real big changes were committed since then.
But after the partnership between Zend and Adobe things started to change and amfphp started to move forward to the Zend Framework… and in fact many developers were afraid about the real future of amfphp.
Bt, as Wade said, the amfphp core will remain separated from the framework implementation ( a framework which I will never use however ), in order to have a shared core and 2 different branches for the implementation. ( a new release was promised before Adobe MAX )
However I’m afraid too about what could happen expecially when 2 major software houses “promote” an opensource project.
Probably I’m too sceptical, but I believe that in the future more and more things will be only supported in the zend_amf and not in the standalone amfphp project.

PHP5: a big failure ?

What’s happening ?
PHP 5 has been presented as a revolution, a lot of new features have been added and a lot of projects have been made. But only a small group of hosters seem interested in supporting PHP 5 on their web servers. It is not so useful to have a beautiful programming language to use if we can’t apply it to production environments.
But what about the causes ? Maybe they are related to the fact that Zend decided to support both PHP 4 and 5 separately, allowing hoster to choose which version to compile on their webservers, or maybe to the fact that PHP 5 is not fully compatible with the older versions, and there are some security-related bugs that increase our doubts.
I’m using a lot PHP 5 in production environments, without any problem. It is quite fast and reliable, and has got a lot of useful features that adapt perfectly to enterprise development. We MUST use PHP 5 to help it growing until it become the standard …
To conclude I’d like to inform the ones who don’t know it, that PHP team is working on the sixth version (yes … PHP 6 … and it is available for download at snaps.php.net) that will add to the language a lot of interesting features, such as native support to Unicode.
I hope there will be only one (working) version of PHP in the future …

PHP 5.0.0 Released!

Finally, after months of release candidates…
Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

* The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
* XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
* A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
* A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
* A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL’s new features, such as prepared statements.
* SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website.
* Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.
* And lots more…

http://www.php.net