W00t! 5.3.0 stable is out. Never expected it to take this long, but its a lesson to keep faithful to the "release early, release often mantra" in the future. At some point a branch can just get too big, that it becomes close to impossible to release it. While I do appreciate the various thank you (or in the case of backslash haters "drop dead") emails, I want to highlight that all I really did is take over the tasks that require at most a bit of patience and certainly no technical skill (well I did have to update a few websites, but even there I needed Hannes to fix all my typos).

It almost happened, but it didn't for now. Originally we planned to release today. But again a few issues came up, even with Johannes deciding that sleep is for the weak, it just seemed unwise to announce the release today. So we pushed things back a few days, so the new date is June 30th (meaning it will be a Tuesday release). This also gives the documentation team, who have been expanding the 5.3 docs like crazy, a few more days to beef things up even more. Now is really high time to ensure that you have a PHP 5.3 compatible release of your software ..

There is currently a heated debate spawned with the creation and subsequent announcement of a more or less final decision made by a select group of people at php|tek. Now I am a friend of openness, but I have a hard time remembering any significant existing project within the PHP community that actually changed its coding guidelines. For all I know the main CS in the PHP world originated in the Horde project, but adopted and expanded by PEAR, got adopted and expanded by Zend Framework. See the pattern?

Looks like there is hope yet for the owners of the MySQL copyright to bring around their development. There is a proposal (actually it seems its already decided to ahead with it) up on their public wiki that details a development approach that could finally become compatible with the real world, rather than managers checking off feature lists. Maybe its too late already, but maybe its just in time to "fend off" the increasing competition for who provides the best MySQL distribution.

The main project I have been working on for the past year, never had automated testing. I must admit I am not a testing guru and none of the other people on the team were experienced. Furthermore I am not that convinced of having to change all of my code to be more testable or that everything that isn't easily testable is necessarily wrong anyways. For the most part the application consists of various callable methods that do some sort of SQL queries, ranging from a single one to a series of highly complex dynamic queries. Personally I am not a believer in maintaining SQL dumps that map to returned data, I want to query the real database. I also felt that making the various methods all unit testable was going to make the actual code more complex. So I really wanted functional testing, but I didn't see an efficient way to do this.