I spoke with Guillaume Nodet at ApacheCon about the ServiceMix project.

Related links:

• ServiceMix website
• Guillaume’s Blog

You can listen to the interview HERE, or on iTunes.

At ApacheCon, I spoke with Fuse, who are sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation, and were exhibiting at ApacheCon. As usual, in addition to talking about how they manage to make money around software that they give away for free, we talked about what they get out of sponsoring the ASF.

Related links:

• Fuse
• Progress

Listen to the interview HERE, or on iTunes.

Due to unfortunate circumstances Windows binaries for PECL extensions will no longer be available on http://pecl4win.php.net. Work is being done to incorporate Windows binaries for PECL extensions into pecl.php.net and will hopefully be ready early 2009 If anyone is interested in the project please join the PHP Windows Development mailinglist.

The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.8. This release addresses a regression introduced by 5.2.7 in regard to the magic_quotes functionality, which was broken by an incorrect fix to the filter extension. All users who have upgraded to 5.2.7 are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Alternatively you can apply a work-around for the bug by changing "filter.default_flags=0" in php.ini.

Due to a security bug found in the PHP 5.2.7 release, it has been removed from distribution. The bug affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.7. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.7: Upgraded PCRE to version 7.8 (Fixes CVE-2008-2371) Fixed missing initialization of BG(page_uid) and BG(page_gid), reported by Maksymilian Arciemowicz. Fixed incorrect php_value order for Apache configuration, reported by Maksymilian Arciemowicz. Fixed a crash inside gd with invalid fonts (Fixes CVE-2008-3658). Fixed a possible overflow inside memnstr (Fixes CVE-2008-3659). Fixed security issues detailed in CVE-2008-2665 and CVE-2008-2666. Fixed bug #45151 (Crash with URI/file..php (filename contains 2 dots)).(Fixes CVE-2008-3660) Fixed bug #42862 (IMAP toolkit crash: rfc822.c legacy routine buffer overflow). (Fixes CVE-2008-2829) Fixed extraction of zip files and directories with crafted entries, reported by Stefan Esser. Further details about the PHP 5.2.7 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.7, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5. Update (December 6th): Added missing zip security fix

The PHP development team is proud to announce the third alpha release of the upcoming PHP 5.3.0 minor version update of PHP. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. It is imperative that more people join the effort to complete the documentation for PHP 5.3.0. Please also review the NEWS file. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! The purpose of this alpha release is to encourage users to not only actively participate in identifying bugs, but also in ensuring that all new features or necessary backwards compatibility breaks are noted in the documentation. Please report any findings to the QA mailinglist or the bug tracker. There have been a great number of other additions and improvements since the last alpha, but here is a short overview of the most important changes: Namespaces (documentation has been updated to the current state) Rounding behavior ext/msql has been removed, while ext/ereg will now raise E_DEPRECATED notices ext/mhash has been replaced by ext/hash but full BC is maintained PHP now uses cc as the default compiler, instead of gcc A number of bug fixes to ext/pdo, ext/soap, the stream layer among others Several under the hood changes also require in depth testing with existing applications to ensure that any backwards compatibility breaks are minimized. The current release plan expects a stable release sometime around the end of Q1 2009.

December is a busy and exciting time of the year. PHP Advent is an attempt to capture and share doses of wisdom from a few of the people in the PHP community who have been kind enough to share their thoughts and tips. Please join us on our daily journey by subscribing to our feed or following us on Twitter. Happy holidays.

In New Orleans, I spoke with Bertrand Delacretaz, who is a new board member, and also is the composer of the music that we’re using these days for FeatherCast. He spoke with me about Sling, which is in the Incubator, and about his duties on the board

Related links:

• Sling
• Apache Board
• The Incubator

You can listen to it HERE or via iTunes.

This week, the Incubator PMC voted to accept Stonehenge into the Incubator. While at ApacheCon, I spoke with Paul Fremantle and Kamaljit Bath about this project, which is an effort to produce example applications to assist developers in building products which are interoperable.

You may listen to it HERE or via iTunes.

Related links:

• The Stonehenge incubator proposal

By the way, our cool new theme music was composed by Bertrand Delacretaz, who is a board member of the Apache Software Foundation.

The 2008 edition of the French PHP users welcomes once again unique speakers : Zak Greant, from Foo Associates, Laura Thompson from Mozilla, and Lukas Smith, Core PHP Developper. Set in Paris, on December 8th and 9th 2008, by the Association Française des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP User Group, http://www.afup.org/), the Forum PHP 2008 focuses on the themas of Professional Web Services, and PHP large scale projects.

The first keynote at ApacheCon New Orleans was from David Recordon, who has been involved in Open Social and OpenID, and is now involved in the Open Web Foundation. David talks about all of these things, Apache Shindig and about how he first got involved in Open Source.

Related links:

• Open Web Foundation
• Shindig
• Open ID
• OpenSocial

You can listen HERE or via iTunes.

Part of what we do when we produce a podcast is to go through the audio and remove the “um”s, “ah”, and so on. What you didn’t know is that I save these up. It’s a hobby of mine. (Just kidding.)

Anyways, the following is my lightning talk from ApacheCon US 2008, posted by the request of the audience. So, at the risk of nobody ever agreeing to do a FeatherCast ever again, here it is.

Yes, we’ve been silent a long time, but ApacheCon has motivated me to do some more Feathercasts. I’ve got 8 of them lined up, and the first one of these is a conversation with Paul Querna about what’s coming for the Apache Web Server project.

Related links

• Apache Web Server

You can listen to it here, or on iTunes

PHP North West are pleased to announce their first conference, PHPNW08, to be held at Manchester Central (formerly GMex). On Saturday 22nd November 2008, PHPNW08 will bring together the North-of-England PHP community for a one-day event of exceptional presentations, challenging workshops, sensational debates and networking opportunities. The conference will host a mixture of well-known regulars on the speakers' circuit and local talent, and aims to highlight current best practices and emerging topics within the sphere of PHP and web development. See our conference schedule for details. We would love developers, designers, managers or anyone else with an interest in the PHP programming language to join us for what promises to be an awesome event at a very reasonable rate: Standard tickets: £60.00 Early bird (until 8th November): £50.00 Concessionary tickets: £35.00 Tickets for PHPNW08 are on sale now at http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw08/register/.

PHP London are pleased to announce their 4th annual UK PHP conference, building on the success of previous events and accommodating the continual growth of the PHP community and PHP development industry. The event will take place on Friday February 27th 2009 at Olympia Conference Centre, London. Registration will commence in December 2008 and those interested in attending can create an account on the PHP UK Conference website at http://www.phpconference.co.uk/user/register and sign-up for notifications of updates to the website. The Call For Papers is now open and finishes at the end of November 2008. Speakers interested in talking at the event can submit their details at http://www.phpconference.co.uk/call-for-papers whilst potential sponsors can contact the conference committee using the form at http://www.phpconference.co.uk/contact