Summary: Episode 159 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Tim Boronczyk (@zaemis), the Managing Editor of phpmaster.com about the new features in PHP5.4, PHP’s strengths and weaknesses, and the DIY approach of the PHP community. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #159: PHP Master with Tim Boronczyk (MP3, 20:27, 19.6MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Louis and Tim Boronczyk talk about the starting up of phpmaster.com, about the new features in PHP5.4 including traits and the Session Upload Progress Indicator, PHP’s strengths and weaknesses including an exhaustive blog post made recently on the topic, and the DIY approach of the PHP community. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/159. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. We’ve got a bit of an interview show this week, with me on the show is Timothy Boronczyk, or Tim, do I call you Tim? Tim: You can call me Tim, Tim is fine. Louis: Alright, let’s go with Tim. Tim Boronczyk is the managing editor of phpmaster.com which is one of SitePoint’s latest ventures, so it’s a blog that’s all about the wonderful world of PHP. So, hi Tim, and welcome to the show. Tim: Hi, thanks for having me, it’s exciting. Louis: It’s great to have you. Have you been managing PHP Master from the get-go, or pretty much from the get-go? Tim: Yeah, right from its beginning, probably I want to say about eight months, six, seven, eight months, thereabouts. Louis: Alright. So do you want to just maybe for anyone listening who’s not familiar with PHP Master, or who hasn’t had a chance to see the site, what kind of things do you tend to publish about, how are things going, what’s the pitch? Tim: Well, it’s a little bit of everything, we publish three times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so fire up your RSS readers if you haven’t already. We try to have a little bit of everything for everybody. We have some beginner level articles on there to help new programmers improve their skills and become a PHP master, we have some intermediate for those who have done their time in PHP apprenticeship land and are looking to improve their skills, and we have some really in-depth nitty-gritty articles for those who already consider themselves PHP masters. Louis: Right. So I figured given that I got a chance to have you on the show we could talk a little bit about just PHP in general, where it’s at and where it’s heading, so, first and foremost, the latest version of PHP is version 5.4 and that’s a relatively new release, right? Tim: Yes, it’s out probably a couple months now. Louis: I’ve only been superficially aware of PHP in version 5.4, I work a little bit with PHP but mostly with Ruby and Rails, so maybe can you talk a bit about what the really cool features are in PHP 5.4. Tim: There’s a lot of new features in 5.4 that you can be excited about, for me there are probably three or four that I personally think are pretty neat, the first one being the Session Upload Progress Indicator; the PHP developers have stuck information into the session while you’re doing a file upload so you don’t have to do any weird, hacky, flash, weird — just dirty code things; you can submit your form to post your file to the server and spin off an Ajax request [...]
