For a few years now at work we've been using a patched version of PHP, one those patching featuring type hinting. Over time this proved to be a very handy feature that allows for a much more readable code and introduces a language based validation layer to ensure that the right data types are getting to your functions and methods. It also caught numerous bugs due to functions returning or passing un-expected values. Best of all this feature does not require any changes on the part of opcode caches (essential component for PHP performance) and allows for simple deployment. I and other people have tried a number of times in the past to introduce type hinting into stock PHP, but unfortunately have never been successful. On a general level most people agree it would be a good idea to have, since it is an optional feature and does not introduce any regressions, heck you can even mix type hinted code with the non-type hinted one. The "PROBLEM" has always been combining of PHP's typeless nature with type hinting,...

After over 2 years in development, huge amount of commits and changes PHP 5.3.0 is finally out. Kudos to Lukas M. Smith and Johannes Schlüter who have managed this herculean task and overall have done an excellent job. There are some really nifty features in this release such as namespaces, closures, mail() logging, a bunch of new extensions and much more. Hopefully, the process of making 5.3 be production ready will be a quick one, as a large amount of testing has already gone into making this release possible. In fact, I be brave enough to say that for non-mission critical environments PHP 5.3 is ready to go as is.

A few hours ago, 11th release of PHP 5.2, 5.2.10 was released to the world. This, as most past 5.2.X releases has been largely focused on bug fixing with quite a few obscure crashes and memory leaks being addressed, in addition to a single security fix in the exif_read_data() function. All in all there are over 100 individual bug fixes in this release and most 5.2.X and definitely all 4.X users should consider upgrading to this version. The sources and windows binaries for this release can be found at http://www.php.net/downloads.php and the detailed changelog itemizing all of the changes can be seen here.

I was buying 2 monitors for the office today, when a came to paying the bill I discovered a rather nasty surprise. It seems that the Ontario government has decided to apply a $12.03 per monitor recycling tax as part of their EOS program. It looks like our liberal provincial government is always on a look out to grab more of our money, so they can spend it on idiotic initiatives such as eHealth.

Wow, time certainly does fly. I've started with PHP back in 1997, and A LOT has changed since then in terms of the language's capabilities, user base, and the sheer quantity of sites and applications built on it. Hopefully the next 14 years will bring as many improvements and innovations as the 1st 14 did. Happy B-Day PHP!