If you haven't seen this "forecast" from Bruce Perens, then you will most likely find this interesting. Available at Bruce's site, Bruce basically predicts that companies will be migrating away from PHP as they become plagued by security issues created by inexperienced users. Agree? Disagree? Why not leave your comment at the site? Oh that's right... comments have been disabled. Guess we'll have to voice our opinions in another venue.

You can now get your geeky chuckles courtesy of Richard Davey and his recently created "PHP Life" comic strip. Richard infuses his own sense of PHP humor along with subtle (or not so subtle) commentary on the state of PHP. Check it out at http://www.phplife.org/

Damien Seguy let us know he has just published the recent PHP usage stats on his site, http://www.nexen.net. To quote Damien:

• PHP 4.4.x shows impressive growth during last month, taking scores of web sites from PHP 4.3.11 and 4.3.10. Users are migrating in spite of BC break.
• PHP 5.x rises again, almost reaching 5%, following the trend of the previous months. PHP 5.1, published late during the month, had no time to have impact.
• PHP keeps its level of usage even with complex architectures: domains covering 2 or more IP are even showing a slightly higher usage of PHP : + 1% to 38% of total.

To see the stats in full, you can visit http://www.nexen.net/interview/index.php?id=53 and http://www.nexen.net/interview/index.php?id=54 for the evolution graph (new this month). Yes, these are in French, but just babelfish it and you'll be fine.

The speakers at this year have begun to post their slides from ApacheCon last week. PHP-specific talks can be found at:

• Chris Shiflett & Geoff Young - Power PHP Testing: http://brainbulb.com/talks/power-php-testing.pdf
• Adam Trachtenberg - Consuming Web Services Using PHP5 - http://www.trachtenberg.com/talks/apachecon2005.pdf

If you're a Smarty user, or just ready to take the plunge and play around with it- there is a new version out there ready for you. Per the Smarty site, "This release addresses some minor bug fixes and feature enhancements, and also plays nicer with PHP 5.1." To download, go to http://smarty.php.net/download.php.

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:

• HTML_CSS 1.0.0RC2 - HTML_CSS is a class for generating CSS declarations.
• XML_FastCreate 1.0.3 - Fast creation of valid XML with DTD control.
• PEAR_Frontend_Gtk2 0.0.6 - Graphical PEAR installer based on PHP-Gtk2
• PHP_Compat 1.5.0 - Provides missing functionality for older versions of PHP
• Net_NNTP 1.3.0 - Implementation of the NNTP protocol
• Payment_Process 0.6.4 - Unified payment processor

And for PECL, we had:

• PDO_INFORMIX - PDO driver for IBM Informix INFORMIX databases
• pecl_http - Extended HTTP Support

As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net and http://pecl.php.net.

The next few weeks I will be off for the holidays, so we will see you after the first of the year... Happy Holidays!