Reliable Systems - Software Development Blog

Having monitored the Planet PHP feed for last 6 months I felt there wasn't really all that much I needed to catch up on in PHP/MySQL realm, but the things that caught my eye were:

• PHP IDE by Zend - I still cannot get it to work, it's so early in the life cycle, that it doesn't even have ANY manual or documentation on the website - scary. I'd like to use it instead of buying a license for Zend Studio, but I'm not sure if I can wait any longer - or if there's point in waiting.
• MySQL 5 finally gets first users. That version has some of the features of more complex RDBMS, like triggers, views, stored procedures etc. But I'm concerned about people using stored procedures in PHP - I've seen how they are often abused in Microsoft realm and wouldn't like to see that kind of "abstraction" in the PHP world. Other than that - it's good that MySQL finally has similar functionality to PostgreSQL, it's time to evaluate the pros and cons of these databases and do another comparison.
• Zend Framework! At the moment it's still v 0.13, and while the specification changes daily and you cannot really use it yet - it looks promising, for having the Front Controller built in and enforcing Proper Views in MVC. I'm looking forward for some better database abstraction (Object-Relational Mapping), because the built in support is really a wrapper for PHP5's PDO, which doesn't make developers free from using SQL statements all over the place.
• PHP 5.1 - nothing new there, except of the built-in suport for PDO. But I think that PEAR_DB did the job well enough, so the developers' productivity gain from it won't be significant (unlike the scripts performance which will increase dramatically).

That would be it - at least in terms of general purpose tools and techniques in the PHP realm.