After a long and arduous 8 months of development and testing, PHP 4.3.0 is out! With regard to scope, time, and effort, this is the largest 4.x release of PHP, and it further elevates PHP’s standing as a serious contender in the general purpose scripting language arena.

Need a nice WYSIWYG editor for your latest project? Something that looks like this?

The Richtext Editor project is an Open Source project hosted by SourceForge.net. The editor is an Internet Explorer based WYSIWYG HTML Text Editor which can be hosted in a web page or form. It requires no additional components as it is written entirely in DHTML and JavaScript.

Good news for the PHP developer community- www.expertrating.com, the global skills assessment provider has launched an online PHP Certification exam. Candidates who pass the exam will be mailed a hardcopy certificate of accomplishment. The launch of the ExpertRating PHP Exam has generated a lot of excitement amongst PHP developers and employers alike. To know more, visit http://www.expertrating.com/details.asp?examid=91

spotted in http://www.hebig.org/blog/

Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc, lining up a deal that would throw enterprise Java into a spin, Gavin Clarke writes.

Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets San Francisco, California-based Macromedia’s Flash vector graphics design tool and player, which was radically updated this year.

Microsoft’s own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops.

Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering .NET.

An acquisition, though, would be seen as a hostile move deliberately designed to thwart J2EE uptake. Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which – through Macromedia’s changes this year – took a step closer to J2EE.

from Freshmeat, a good example of integrating PHP with command line

RIBS is an incremental backup system written in PHP which utilizes some common *nix programs (specifically rsync, ssh and cp). Incremental backups mean frequent backups can be done (i.e. hourly) with only around 2x the space of the full backup. Using rsync means that RIBS can act as both a backup script on a local machine, or as a script to backup several network hosts. It is designed to be highly configurable and highly informative to the system administrator. There is a high amount of error checking, and logging/email capabilities.

from C|Net, some interesting picks

A big part of technology marketing is based upon pure hyperbole because the industry is selling science, and science happens to be a nebulous topic. So combine the vague nature of science with aggressive sales tactics, and what do you get? Hype. As 2002 comes to a close, here are my picks for the year’s top 10 most overhyped technologies and marketing messages.

How do the rates you\’re getting for PHP development work match up with those of other developers, and those in other countries? This was a popular topic recently at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PHP_UK, here are some highlights.

There is also the occasional site that posts it\’s rates, http://thebrainroom.com/services/pricing.php is one example. I\’ve found there to be a huge discrepancy between the various accounts you\’ll hear, one chap at PHPCON 2002 was telling me he had no problems charging €130/hr, though maybe this was a tall tale

Thanks to Harry Fuecks over at phppatterns.com for this article on PHP and Variable References. Much has been written on the subject however Harry’s article sums it up quite nicely. If you are new to working with OOP in PHP this is essential reading.

Hi again

I’m please to let you know that I’ve just put a new release of JPHP online. It’s the version 2.1 alpha rc1. Almost rewrite from scratch to gain more performance and much more object oriented than before.
Package has bean re-designed to be cleaner.
Here are the features :

• 100% OO than before
• many new packages/classes :
  • xml dom (jphp.xml)
  • http environnement abstraction using xml file (request,response,cookie, session, …)
  • complexe datastructure interface
  • a rich IO package (reader,writer,filter,…)
  • etc.
• database : new class DirectQuery, make your sql call easier !
• much more flexible using interface class and design pattern

So check it at : http://www.jphplib.org

If you’re interested in writing DocBook style documentation this tutorial is for you.  DocBook is basically SGML (XML) markup that can be output in any of the following formats:

• HTML
• PDF
• Man pages
• PostScript
• TeX and DVI
• RTF
• TexInfo

DocBook is generally considered the standard for programming documentation (not API docs) but is used in many other disciplines as well.  If you’ve ever read PEAR documentation of anything by Eric Raymond, you’ve read DocBook