Derick recently released Xdebug 2, you know that thing that makes your coding life sooooo much easier. That thing which took hours and hours to develop. Here it is in all its shiny stable glory. So what did the author ask in return for releasing this goody as open source, already in its second incarnation? He asked for a little post card send to Norway. Thats it! Thats all he asked in return.

Whenever someone asks me why PHP is more "agile" than Java, I tell them that in PHP you can break most of the rules your comp sci course told you about and get away with it. Of course this means that you need PHP developers to constantly clean up their code. To paraphrase Jani: "Everytime you open a file you leave it a bit cleaner than it was before." This one is a fundamental mind set any good PHP programmer needs. Without it we will quickly feel all the pain our wise comp sci prof's wanted to spare us by telling all these rules that "shall never be broken".

Konsta recently formulated quite ambitious goals for the rest of the Google Summer of Code project. The goal is to have an 1.0.0 RC1 by August 31st. This would of course mark a significant milestone in the development of Doctrine, as this would finally give people the promise of a stable API to work with. Until then a number of things need to be done.

So I need to create a portal site, where we will require multiple frontends. As most portal's we need to store some state information inside a session. We also need to show how many users are online, but more importantly be able to filter searches in the member database by who is online (we do not need to filter by how long the last site interaction as been, but you never know with changing requirements).

A recent post by Rasmus really reminded me of something I have noticed often before, but never really done anything about. The fact that we do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?