Sameer has come up with an easy way to build out query strings to use in your GET requests:

Passing variables with a url is such a frequent thing programmers do that most of you may think this post is unwarranted. We call this method of passing variables as GET, the other being POST. It is one of those things which can be easily done in php. [...] The best way to pass GET variables is to use the http_build_query() function available from php version 5; which takes an array of variables and builds a nice URL encoded string which you can append to a url. And example is shown below.

He includes two code examples - one showing "the old way" of building it out by hand and the other using the http_build_query function. You pass in an array and what to connect them with and it builds out the string, no matter how many arguments there are.

Pierre-Alain Joye has pointed out that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.2.x series (5.2.7RC3) has been posted for download.

PHP 5.2.7RC3 has been released. It is likely to be the last RC and the final release is planed for Thursday next week. Please test it and report any issue you may found. The sources can be fetched here and the binaries in the windows site.

He also mentions a milestone for the PHP project - releasing the Windows builds at the same time as the normal source builds. Check out on the php.internals list for more information.

The symfony blog has a new post spotlighting one of the new features of their 1.2 release - updates to its Doctrine functionality.

A lot of awesome stuff has been added recently to the next major symfony release, 1.2. Fabien has worked very hard to add without a doubt the most sophisticated features of any PHP framework that exists today. Not only are they nice features but he has implemented them in a OO way so that it is easy for me to implement the same features with another ORM, Doctrine. All this is done with very little work by me. So, give a big thanks to him if you enjoy this.

Included in the post is a real-world example showing how to use the symfony command line to build out an environment and create connections to the articles, categories and authors tables.

Alex Netkachov made a happy discovery recently and wanted to share it, so he blogged about it - the inclusion of his suggestion into the nightly build of the PDT extension for Eclipse:

Happy dreams of PHP developers come true. Yesterday I received a letter from Eclipse PDT bugzilla with notification that my proposition about autocomplete for properties that submitted more than a year ago is implemented in PDT 2.0 nightly builds.

There's a screenshot included in the post and he points to the download page where you can grab the files you'll need.

In a new post to his blog David Parra talks about compiling extension on Windows (specifically his ktaglib one).

This is actually the reason to not even try to compile my ktaglib extensions under Windows. Well but this approach is doomed to fail as most of the developers out there use Windows as their operating system. [...] So actually I ended up booting up windows again (well after searching for the harddisk that contains a running windows) and try to compile it. Otherwise my fellow collegues wouldn't be able to fix my buggy PHP code.

He talks about the pecl2 updates and how it makes compiling on a Windows system easier than before and two resources that budding Windows extension developers can use to get started - the PHP.net wiki and a screencast from Elizabeth Smith that can help out quite a bit.

Christopher Jones mentions the release of the latest OCI8 component for PHP - version 1.3.4 stable.

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.

He also mentions the work on the Windows version of the extension that he's been up to with the plan to make two OCI8 DLL releases for the future - one using 10g libraries and the other using 11g.

This recent post on the PHP::Impact blog spotlights a useful little tool for those developers needing to span the gap between PHP and Java in their applications - the PHP/Java Bridge.

The PHP/Java bridge allows you to quickly access Java classes from within your PHP classes without having to know Java and vice versa. Because of this two-way flexibility, you can access hundreds of pre-built Java classes from PHP, and hundreds of pre-built PHP classes from Java opening up your applications to greater flexibility and enhanced functionality.

The post includes an introduction to the bridge's functionality - its functions/methods, how to make a new instance of it, catching exceptions and the type conversion it automatically does (like lang.java.String directly to the PHP String type).

They also mention the Zend Platform bridge functionality for a more commercial solution.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook shares his reasoning for making all of your pages PHP pages, regardless of static content or dynamic.

By making all your web pages PHP pages from the start, you are basically leaving open the possibility of using PHP in your web pages at any time.

By his reasoning, it provides an "out" for you later on should you decide that a page needs to have some dynamic content thrown in there somewhere (without having to change the filename - bad for SEO, supposedly).

PHPBuilder.com.au continues their look at using phpMyAdmin in this new part of the series today. This new article focuses on using the interface to make queries against the data in your tables.

The previous article gave you an overview of the phpMyAdmin interface and functionality. It's now time to dive in further and learn how to construct and execute queries.

They show (complete with screenshots) how to use the GUI to build the different parts of your query - a simple SELECT statement with a join pulling together the customer information and their addresses.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.