My slides introducing PHP 5.4.12 from the talk at Confoo are now available online and can be downloaded at: http://ilia.ws/files/confoo13_php54.pdf If you attended the talk, I would love to hear you feedback view Joind.In.

My slides from the "Bottleneck Analysis" at PHP UK are now available here. If you've attended talk, I'd love to hear your feedback via Joind.In.

My slides from the two talks I gave at the PHP Benelux Conference are now available online and can be downloaded here: Application Logic Security Introduction to PHP 5.4.(11) If you've attended the talk(s) please leave feedback via Joind.In at: http://joind.in/talk/view/7814 and/or http://joind.in/talk/view/7791

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).