OCI8 extension for Oracle have been improved in PHP5.3 with 7 bugs fixed in addition to many improvements and new features mainly :

• Added Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) support.
• Added support for Oracle External Authentication (not supported on Windows).
• Improve persistent connection handling of restarted DBs.
• Added SQLT_AFC (aka CHAR datatype) support to oci_bind_by_name
• Changed default value of oci8.default_prefetch from 10 to 100.
• Allow building (e.g from PECL) the PHP 5.3-based OCI8 code with PHP 4.3.9 onwards
• Provide separate extensions for Oracle 11g and 10g on Windows.

Oracle support for PHP is already 12 years old since the php/fi 2.0, at that time the oracle.c and oracle.h where checked by Stig Sæther Bakken on April 1997. Download PHP 5.3, For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between 5.2 and 5.3 releases.

Published at Oracle PHP Magazine

The two magic numbers of the day are 5 and 3, and after PHP 5.3, Firefox 3.5 have just been released. Firefox 3.5 aims to be the Fastest browser ever, a Sunspider test on windows xp machine show only 1,524ms compared to FF2 and FF3 with respectively 18,148ms and 3,669ms, and I guess there is need to compare to other browsers.

Major new features in Firefox 3.5 are :

• Support for the HTML5 video and audio elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, canvas text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

There are already 1,2 Million Firefox 3.5 Download, so you can also join the fun and upgrade here http://www.firefox.com.

Published at Firefox Magazine

The PHP development team have just announced the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

• Support for namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures
• Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut "?:" and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
• Under the hood performance improvements
• Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
• Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
• Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
• More consistent float rounding
• Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
• Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
• New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
• Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

• Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
• Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
• Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
• Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

Published at PHP5 Magazine

The Spanish PHP Barcelona Conference 2009 will be held this year on September 25th-26th, so if you are Spanish or English speaker and you want to share scenario with Derick Rethans or Sebastian Bergmann go to the Call for Papers section and follow the instructions to send your presentation.

This year, we have lots of improvements: two days of event, two languages (English and Spanish), different types of conferences (talks, workshops, etc.), big new sponsors, and much more. It’ll be a big party and if you want to join us, you are very welcome.

Published at Open Events Magazine

For those who missed the first CodeWorks 2009 webcast, like myself, Matthew Turland posted slides and source code of his presentation titled "New SPL Features in PHP 5.3". Matthew talked about containers and how SPL can help with scalability in your application, with very interesting benchmarks comparing Arrays to SPL methods.

You can read more about SPL here and here. There are more webcasts coming this summer to celebrate the CodeWorks 09 Conference, so be sure to not miss next ones !

Published at PHP5 Magazine

Sponsored Post: Many web hosting comparison websites are available today and if you were having hard time before to find the most suitable web hosting for your business, today you will be confused about comparison websites available and which one could you trust. FindMyHosting is not only a web hosting comparison website but also a search engine for web hosting plans. The website list in the home page an updated top 10 web hosting plans with best plans that have been rated by users so you can choose directly, in addition to an easy shared web hosting search tool where you can find the hosting plan the better suit your needs.

Another interesting feature is the Hosting Directories, you can find web hosting plans organized in different categories such e-Commerce, Windows, Frontpage, PHP/MySQL, ASP, Linux, JSP, ColdFusion, Cheap web hosting ...etc. Result could be ordered by rating score or price, I just wish if there was more filtering options here in results - something like amazon filters - to make it easier to see only plans with interests.

FindMyHosting came also with an advanced web hosting search form, where you can check on different features that you need then get results. The comparison feature is a little confusing because it's called also My stored plans on some page and compare plans on others, to add plan for comparison simply use the save button under the plan details. The check host reliability feature seems not working when we check it and return a blank page, but overall the FindMyHosting's rating is more than enough to give you better idea on how different user experienced different hosting plans.

If you are actually looking for web hosting, I think you can find very reliable web hosting plans that goes from budget To e-commerce. Visit FindMyHosting.com

Published at Hosting Magazine

Marco Tabini pointed today to an article on the Google Code titled Let's make the web faster, PHP performance tips. The article point to some coding tips written by Google webmaster Eric Higgins about variables usage, echo, if/switch cases ...

this article relates primarily to what are usually termed "micro" optimizations—that is, small tweaks that you can make to your code to yield some measure of improvement in your performance or, as is the case with a number of the suggestion in the post by Eric Higgins, in the readability of your code

The idea of using such tips without understanding them is not useful at all, especially that this is only micro optimizations only as Marco pointed in his article. It will be more useful if these guides teaches developers to program correctly and so they can use each functions in its correct place.

Published at PHP Community Magazine

Yesterday, Pádraic Brady, posted on his blog The Art Of Deception Or Publishing PHP6 Books pointing mainly to a book published by wrox titled Professional PHP 6. If unicode is most awaited feature in PHP6, all other features have been implemented in 5.2 and 5.3

Shame on all publishers guilty of this silliness. To anyone in the market for a PHP book, stick to the bargain bins and second hand stores until a genuine PHP 5.3 book is released (that actually covers PHP 5.3's new features mind!). The real PHP6 books are probably years away but PHP 5.3 looks to be a great release with plenty of new features..next Tuesday!

Today I was reading on his blog also, a response from Wrox publishing. Wrox proved that they are listening and that's what make them one of the best publishers for professional technical books. Jim Minatel, Associate Publisher - wrox, wrote in an email to Pádraic :

...First, I've asked the team involved with Beginning PHP6 scheduled to ship to the printer this week to pull that book back, to read your post and the subsequent twitter discussion and to make sure we aren't making the same mistake a third time. I want the author and editors to provide a level of confidence that the PHP6 features that should be covered are, that the discussion of the current state of PHP6 is accurate, and the that the title, subtitle, and marketing copy on the book and online accurately reflects what is and isn't covered...

Pádraic you are not the only one impressed with wrox, I'm sure !

Published at PHP Community Magazine

In a recent post in Mozilla Security Blog, Brandon Sterne Security Program Manager talked about Mozilla effort to shut down XSS (Cross-Site-Scripting) attacks with Content Security Policy.

For several years, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks have plagued many of the web's most popular sites and victimized their users. At Mozilla, we've been working for the last year on a new technology called Content Security Policy, designed to shut these attacks down.

Mozilla is making efforts not only to make Firefox the fastest browser, but also the most secure platform. Brandon explains CSP approach to validate content :

In order to differentiate legitimate content from injected or modified content, CSP requires that all JavaScript for a page be 1) loaded from an external file, and 2) served from an explicitly approved host. This means that all inline script, javascript: URIs, and event-handling HTML attributes will be ignored. Only script included via a script tag pointing to a white-listed host will be treated as valid. Additionally, CSP allows several other common-sense security restrictions to be enforced.

Of course this will not save you 100% from XSS, Clickjacking or Packet Sniffing Attacks, but I think it's a good initiative from browsers to help keeping the web safe.

Published at Firefox Magazine