Ivo Jansch of Ibuildings has an interesting blog post looking back at 2008 and discussing the business prospects for PHP in 2009. One of his key points is during an economic downturn, companies are increasingly attracted to open-source solutions like PHP, due to their cost-effectiveness. A statement that should warm the hearts of PHP developers everywhere as we roll into 2009!

You already know that you can run PHP scripts through your Web server...but did you know that you could also run them through a console shell? In case this is news to you, take a look at Johan Mares' blog post on the topic, in which he's explained everything you need to know to use the PHP command-line interface.

Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.0 is now available from the Eclipse.org download site and from the Zend/PDT Community site (includes Eclipse PDT and Zend Debugger which enables users to perform local and remote debugging). The Eclipse PDT team would like to thank everyone who made this release possible. As always, our Eclipse PDT community has provided countless new features, bug fixes, documentation, etc. We'd also like to thank the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit team for cooperating and helping us with the new infrastructure.

Taken straight from the Memcached website, "Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system". In other words, Memcached helps you increase application perfomance by caching data in memory. Using Memcached to load data instead of a database or file system can have a major impact on your applications performance.

Johannes Schlüter, a member of the MySQL Connectors and Client Connectivity team, has suggested a novel use for PHP: a storage engine for MySQL!

In his blog post, he discusses how the plugin API in MySQL 5.1 makes it easy to write new storage engines, and he illustrates by implementing some of the plugin interfaces using PHP functions. A PHP array is used to store table data, with iterators and array functions being used to read and write records. Worth reading, both to gain a better understanding of MySQL's plugin API, and as an example of some ingenious thinking!

Wade Arnold has a blog post on the session support in Zend_Amf_Server. In his post, he explains how sessions can be used in a Flex application (with example of how to create, regenerate and destroy sessions) and he also has some useful tips on how to secure session identifiers in Flex applications. A useful article for Flex/ZF developers!

There have been a number of PHP conferences in the last month or so, and conference reports have been slowly filtering in. First up, Jeremy Coates has a report on the PHP NW08 Conference, held in Manchester, UK, and he's followed by trip reports and pictures from the PHP Conference Brasil 2008. A number of users have also posted wrap-ups of the International PHP Conference 2008, held in Mainz, Germany. And let's not forget Paris and Sydney...

Federico Cargnelutti has written a blog post about testing Zend Framework controllers using the PHPUnit unit testing framework (v3.3.9 of which was just released). His post includes step-by-step instructions for creating your own unit tests, combining them into test suites, and running them under PHPUnit. Essential reading for anyone serious about ZF development!

It's the holidays, so what better time to kick back and start learning about PHP and Flex? And to get you started, here's a recent article by Richard Bates that demonstrates just how easy it is to create PHP/Flex applications using the integrated features of Zend Studio for Eclipse and the Flex Builder 3 Eclipse Plug-in.

Jeremy Kendall has suggested a method for performing conditional context-based validation using Zend_Validate. His method, which involves using a custom validator that tests the context, allows you to "check the value of a parent field to see if a child field should be required." If context-based validation is something you've been scratching your head over, Jeremy's post (which also contains a few other tricks) should give you some food for thought. Take a look, and add your own custom validator ideas to the comments thread!