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After the voting this week on the PHP Internals mailing list, the releasemaster Illia Alshanetsky summed everything up, and announced the intention to release a 5.3 release. The following list of features is taken from this survey, and each of the features recieved 10 or more votes (out of the possible 28), and is therefor put on the todo list for a possible PHP 5.3. Please keep in mind that it is extremely early, and this list will definately change. Items will be added and removed from the list, and a whole lot of development needs to be done before it is finally there. Don't rewrite your applications just yet. So, on to the list...

Every corporate site that want to join in on the latest hypes, is moving to techniques like AJAX (all the non-corporate sites that want to join in on the hype, did so a year or more ago). If you have no idea what AJAX is about, then please disconnect your computer again, and enjoy your social life (you gotta have one, if you don't know what AJAX is about). Most sites want to retain backwards compatibility. Either because they actually care, or just because the consultant needed a few more bucks. Backwards compatibility with older browsers is a good thing, but usually implemented in a really bad way. Most sites fall back on a browsercheck, and match that against an internal list. This goes wrong either way. Either your textbased/ancient browser is not found on the list, and you get an unusable site, or your other-brand/brandnew browser is not found on the list, and you get a website that represents the earliest days of webdesign. Just don't rely on browserchecks. They don't work, or you need a full blown team that searches the net 24/7 for new and other browsers, their capabilities, and keep that list up to date. And even then I wouldn't rely on them. Don't rely on browser information either. Some browsers, mostly older ones, ly about what they are capable of handling. It's a commonly known fact, but you can't keep a list of all exceptions either. There is however a perfect way to tell if a browser is capable of handling AJAX (or: insert your favorite technique here). Read on...

With the upcoming of Ruby on Rails, and the increase of PHP5 availability on shared webhosts, a lot of blogs are going into the language war again. Wether it is being Ruby vs PHP, PHP vs Java, Java vs Ruby, or whatever combination you can think of, there are a lot of comparisons. So, before you click a way, I'm not going to bug you with that. Each language has it's (dis-)advantages, and in the end it all boils down to the 80/20 rule: personal preference versus suitability for a certain job. You can't wash the dishes with a sledgehammer, and you can't build a house with a towel. But what amazes me in a lot of those blogposts is one recurring argument. 'I rebuilt app X in only Y days, while it took me Z days to built if in language P'. Well, duh! (Read on)

Back in the days, when I still used w3schools.com to learn HTML, I found a little joke on their website. It's an imaginary person asking where he can download the internet. As an answer, they link to this image:

Everyone who has a bit of internet knowledge, knows that it's a joke. Wait, did you say everyone? (Read on)

Lately, I've been working a lot more with other people's codes. Oddly, there seems to be some trend for certain developer to reverse the arguments in an comparison. It even shows up in the PHP manual. Take for example this code piece extracted from the PHP manual :

Wait a minute? What does that !== thingy do? That's explained in the manual too, on the page about comparison operators. To quote:

Waiting for a compile to finish? Just pretending to be at work? Here is the most unusefull way of wasting your time. And, as a bonus, it annoys your co-workers at the same time! Curious? Then start poppin'!

~RW

After the alluring article about Zend Studio Neon on RegDeveloper, Sebastian Bergmann managed to get his hands on a copy of a build, and posted some screenshots on Flickr. The text in the article, and the beautifull screenshots are promising a really nice IDE coming up. I haven't seen an official launch date yet, but I heard it was supposed to be lanched in Q4 of this year.

And your favorite show gets interrupted, again. And while the commercials play by, you start thinking that you’d rather pay more for a subscription, and enjoy your shows without those breaks, then have to watch the same boring commercials, over and over again, on the most inconvenient times. Stop your thinking! There is a great plus side of commercials! Read on…

A couple of weeks ago, the founder(s) of the #php.thinktank channel on FreeNode decided that there was not enough use for the channel to maintain it’s existence. Soon after that, everybody got booted from the channel, and the channel ‘merged’ with #phpc, the PHP Community channel. With a few commands to chanserv, the utopia of PHP knowledge was gone… But gone forever?

During your daily browsing, you’ve probably stumbled upon those paid content delivery networks (CDN) a few times. Those networks give you a limited, low, speed if you are not a paying member, and give you full speed if you did pay to use the premium service. Though it can be annoying for users that want just one file, it can actually help you out quite nice to serve a lot of concurrent visitors, who want to download your latest release, while it’s still hot. If there would only be a simple way too limit speed… Well, there is! And it is pure PHP too. Read on…