John Mertic has put together a what's new list in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release:

PHP V5.3 is set to be released by the end of 2008, and many of the new features in this release have been in the planning stages for a few years. Originally touted as "PHP V6 without native Unicode support," PHP V5.3 has been developed into a feature-rich upgrade to the PHP V5 line. [...] In this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series, we'll look at these new V5.3 features, and see how they are used and how they can be used in your Web application.

In this first part of the series he talks about:

• Improved static method and member handling
• The _callStatic() magic method
• Dynamic static calls
• Late static binding
• Standard PHP Library
• Circular garbage collection

This new article from PHPBuilder.com talks about getting started with one of the newly introduced components of the Zend Framework (in collaboration with Adobe) - the Zend_Amf interface.

To introduce this new Zend Framework extension and give you a look inside its functionality, I show you how to build a Flex application that pulls data from a MySQL database using PHP. First, you set up the application to use XML, the conventional cross-platform data-exchange method. Then, you change the code to use AMF and custom classes.

They give you the tools you'll need to set up the right environment (including version 1.7 or later of the Zend Framework and Adobe Flex Builder) and the steps to create the simple application. It uses a MySQL backend to store contact information ad a basic Flex interface to pull that information back out for display.

In a recent post to his blog Daniel Cousineau take a look at the ImagePlane image editor just released by Net Perspective and some thoughts he has with the PHP demo included with documentation.

While ImagePlane has already been creatively introduced and documented quite thoroughly, I wanted to go over some decisions concerning the PHP demo.

He mentions considerations of things that the tool does like the base64 posting of the image and the possible need for more than one kind of backend image manipulation library. He outlines his interface with four functions (loading, transparency, output quality and saving) and implements it in a sample class and some example usage code.

On the GoodPHPTutorials.com website there's a new tutorial showing how to get the Authorize.net API to talk back and forth between it and your application.

I have taken the time to abstract the AIM API into my own class that not only simplifies the code we will need to work with that API but also makes it modular and easy to port from application to application. To begin you will need to download the AuthnetAIM class. You can find it here.

He walks you through the setup and configuration of the library and includes a few examples of how to make both simple and more complex transactions through it.

A new tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone shows you how to use PHP's "younger cousin" PHP-GTK to make a simple widget.

With PHP's younger cousin PHP-GTK's recent step to maturity with the 2.0 stable release it is a good time to give this project some more attention. In this article I will show you how to create a re-usable IPv4 Entry widget using PHP-GTK's excellent OO structure.

The end result is an interface that lets the user input an IP in a familiar way (blocks of three, automatically advancing to the next block). They talk about the code first, describing how all of the parts fit together before giving you an easily cut-and-pastable block of code (the class) that creates the widget.

Douglas Brown has put together an announcement for a web service he's come up with (and made available for download) to make a tag cloud out of the top keywords from your twitter feed.

The problem I was having was actually judging whether or not it would be worth my time following their tweets. I mean, I follow someone that is really respected in a certain field, only to find out that they tweet about their new puppy they just got more than anything. So I made a PHP script that generates a "Twitter Tag Cloud." Using this, you can generate your own Twitter tag cloud to put on your personal site to display the top keywords that you have been tweeting about.

You can either check out an example of the cloud through the form in the post, use his REST service to get the keywords for a user or you can download his code and try it out for yourself.

In a new post Havard Eide looks at the creation of a Countable interface that can be used in any application:

Today I will look at the Countable interface, it has a single function that needs to be implemented: count(), by implementing this you can ensure that there is a count() function ready to use on any given class that implements it. The Countable interface is used in other places in the SPL as well: the ArrayIterator and ArrayObject classes implements this interface ( and SqliteResult if present ).

In his code examples he shows simple methods for returning the count() of a property, but notes that the real power of it comes in the ability to manipulate the number returned from the call based on other parameters (or filtering).

Andy Frey dropped us a line to tell us about a method he's come up with to make a remoting interface between Javascript and PHP5.

This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Via Terry Chay's blog:

Joakim has let us know about the recent updates that have been made to the WebGrind web-based frontend for XDebug.

Webgrind, the web frontend to Xdebug has been updated to version 0.7 with a few new features like: Support for directly loading a report through hash in url, Visual breakdowns of internal, class and procedural functions and calls to include/require and Version checking.

This new version (0.7) can be downloaded directly from its Google Code page.