I've just released a new version of Excel extension for PHP, v0.9.8. The main purpose of this release is to add compatibility for libxl 3.4. From the library ChangeLog there appear to be quite a few fixes to the library, so it looks like a worth while upgrade for most users.
You can download the tarball at http://ilia.ws/patch/php-excel-0.9.8.tar.bz2.
Sources are available at https://github.com/iliaal/php_excel/.

One important note, the 3.4.0 version of LibXL has a bug that causes numbers to be improperly written to files, therefor you should ONLY use version 3.4.1 that is available at http://www.libxl.com/download/libxl-3.4.1.tar.gz

I've recently started work on porting our internal company PHP patches over to PHP 5.4 as part of our migration from 5.3 to 5.4 One of those patches is the type-hint patch that introduces scalar type hints to PHP (something I wrote originally for PHP 5.1), something that was briefly included in PHP 5.4 but then (unfortunately) reverted.

Since I feel that type-hints is a pretty handy feature to have as it eliminates many possible errors, improves code interrogation and addresses some of the limitations currently being worked-around via annotations I've decided to share this patch with the community. The patch is available for download at: http://ilia.ws/patch/php54_type_hints.txt it applies cleanly against PHP 5.4.8 as well as 5.4 branch (5.4.9RC1). I suspect it will work with earlier versions of PHP 5.4 as well. The patch includes full test coverage around the new functionality and all of the existing tests continue to pass (so nothing is broken).

My slides introducing the PHP Excel extension from the talk at ZendUncon are now available online and can be downloaded at: http://ilia.ws/files/zenduncon_phpexcel.pdf

My slides introducing PHP 5.4.8 from the talk at ZendCon are now available online and can be downloaded at: http://ilia.ws/files/zendcon2012_php54.pdf

A new version of the php-excel extension, v0.9.7 was released and is now available for download at: https://github.com/downloads/iliaal/php_excel/php-excel-0.9.7.tar.bz2

This new version allow for compilation against latest version of LibXL 3.3.1 and provides wrappers for new functions available in LibXL 3.2.4+, which include the following:
- added ExcelSheet::getTopLeftView() and ExcelSheet::setTopLeftView() methods for getting/setting a view position in the sheet
- added ExcelSheet::addrToRowCol() and ExcelSheet::rowColToAddr() methods for translating Excel cell position to row/column definitions

Additionally the extension's "info" section was modified to show the version of LibXL library the extension was compiled against.