I just listened to PRADO founder and core developer Qiang Xue and core maintainer Jason Ragsdale which gave an interview about PRADO on Pro-PHP Podcast recently. It's not a very technical talk actually, but an introduction to what you can expect to find in this framework.

PRADO is being seen as a very mature framework for web applications now. It will be fun to see the masses embrace this framework more in the near future. As you may know, I'm hooked, see you on the forum. ;)

• Unicode and PHP - Derick Rethans
• How PHP Ticks - Derick Rethans
• PHP & Performance - Ila Alshanetsky
• PHP 5 OOP - Ila Alshanetsky
• PHP Security - Ila Alshanetsky
• 3D Rendering with PHP (German) - Kore Nordmann
• Distributing PHP applications with PEAR - Tobias Schlitt
• Relational Database Starter Day - Lukas Smith
• fast, portable, SQL I - Lukas Smith
• fast, portable, SQL II - Lukas Smith
• PEAR hands on - Lukas Smith
• Applikationsintegration mit PHP5 (German) - Markus Wolff
• PHP, AJAX und XUL im Intranet (German) - Markus Wolff
• Winbinding Your Code - Aaron Wormus
• Welten vereinigt euch! Testen von PHP Applikatioenn mit Java Tools - Karl Heinz Marbaise
• Professional Reports With SVG - Stefan Neufeind
• Secure PHP Environment - Stefan Neufeind

Aaron Wormus actually released a podcast from the first conference day :)

A library of high quality PHP classes for the creation of dynamic websites and contentmanagement applications. eZ publish Components is a brand new LGPL licensed product from eZ systems, and is expected to be released in November 2005.

Their plan is that these components should be installable through the PEAR installer. Tobias Schlitt, one of the core members of PEAR, has also joined eZ Systems to help out planning and work on their new framework. eZEP is the first step for eZ Publish 4.0 based on PHP5. I'm looking forward to see this framework comming since I know there's some bright guys behind it.

Rumors say that Zend will most likely announce their work on "Zend PHP Framework" quite soon.

Due later this year, Zend PHP Framework is intended to standardize the way PHP applications are built. A goal of the effort is to foster the development of mission-critical PHP Web applications.

The PEAR library has been around for quite some time now, and code from PEAR is now put into a lot of various PHP projects. The problem with PEAR is that there's only one package for each task and if someone hase another idea of how to solve a problem it's not trivial to contribute that solution having another to go away. What's happening now with the release 1.4 of the PEAR installer and it's support for channels together with companies announcing enterprise supported frameworks we could may be get more reliable library code in PHP. Only the future will show.

I have nothing against PEAR in general, but when I installed PHPeclipse today to try out PHP support in Eclipse for the first time I came over a few warnings about unreachable code in PEAR::Date and more sadly uninitialized variables in PEAR::HTTP and PEAR::DB which is quite core libraries. Of course these are both silly coding errors and may be harmless and minor bugs, but it's interesting to see such PHP errors in core PEAR libraries. I haven't looked at the actual code yet, but it may seem to me at the first sight that it should may be a bit more "monkey validation" at least before packaging a new release? Shouldn't we try to follow E_ALL | E_STRICT?

From the website:

PHP4Mono is a compiler that enables Mono to run PHP code. It is written in C# and translates PHP scripts to Common Intermediate Language (CIL). Like that PHP scripts can be executed as console applications on Mono.

It would be really cool to be able to compile a .NET assembly from PHP source code some time in the future :)