A few hours ago, 11th release of PHP 5.2, 5.2.10 was released to the world. This, as most past 5.2.X releases has been largely focused on bug fixing with quite a few obscure crashes and memory leaks being addressed, in addition to a single security fix in the exif_read_data() function. All in all there are over 100 individual bug fixes in this release and most 5.2.X and definitely all 4.X users should consider upgrading to this version. The sources and windows binaries for this release can be found at http://www.php.net/downloads.php and the detailed changelog itemizing all of the changes can be seen here.

Wow, time certainly does fly. I've started with PHP back in 1997, and A LOT has changed since then in terms of the language's capabilities, user base, and the sheer quantity of sites and applications built on it. Hopefully the next 14 years will bring as many improvements and innovations as the 1st 14 did. Happy B-Day PHP!

The first release candidate of PHP 5.2.10 was just released and is available for download at: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.10RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 4ef611fdcf7269b2d372dbdebc504cdb) For windows users, the all manner of binary packages can be found at: http://windows.php.net/qa/ This is a stabilization release with a whole bunch of bug fixes and no new features, so I hope it'll get released quickly. You can help make it happen by testing your code against this RC and reporting any new bugs and/or regressions you come across.

The slides from my PHP Quebec talk on "Common Optimization Mistakes" are now up and can be downloaded from here: http://ilia.ws/files/phpquebec_2009.pdf I am pretty happy with the talk, which was a bit strange for me, since I get to talk about some of the downside of optimizations, rather then talking about the various specific optimizations. It looked like the audience liked the talk (I hope), so the results seems positive ;-)

After a fairly timely (by PHP standards) release cycle the 5.2.9 release is finally out. As usual there are a few security fixes and a fair number (about 50 or so) general bug fixes. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release, especially so if you are using libxml 2.7 and XML extension, in which case you definitely want to upgrade since this release fixes a CDATA breakage. Big thanks to all the people who contributed patches and fixes as well as those who took the time to file detailed bug reports that helped issue resolution. We'll see how long it will take 5.2.10 to be released ;-) The official release announcement can be found here and the full changelog is available here.