Some minutes ago a new blog post by Bradley Holt popped up in my RSS reader. I admit that alone is no reason to write a blog post here, but the content of the Bradley’s post is worth doing it.
Bradley tells us that the guys at Google plan to add support for a new runtime language in Google’s App Engine. So what’s the problem and what to do now? Bradley writes the following:

Looking at the issue list, support for Java is the most requested item followed by support for PHP, Ruby, then Perl. If you haven’t already, please go star the “support for PHP” issue (please don’t comment on it as it will email everyone who has already starred it - just star it!). Of course, I’m hoping Zend Framework is the framework of choice for all the App Engine specific APIs as well.

I already starred it and so should you!
Click here: To The Issue List

I needed some seconds to find the star, so here is a picture for the slower people like me.

I’m really sorry that it got so quiet here for nearly two month. The first weeks of quietness were simply caused by my laziness but since mid of September I’m totally busy finishing a new php application for my company and the deadline is coming closer and closer every minute. It’s a bit like a vicious circle: I’m of course focussed on the project and even in my spare time it’s difficult to relax because my thoughts are most of the time with the problems, bugs or tasks I need to solve next day. So I’m getting even more stressed, that leads to less productivity which leads to more stress. Well, I guess you got the point. As you can see, I located the problem, but still it’s difficult to break the cycle.
However, if I look at my statistics, there are still some people out there who didn’t kicked me out of their RSS reader lists. Thanks for that. If you are not consuming the RSS feed but visiting my site, you probably noticed that I started restarted microblogging at twitter. Seems like I’m getting more and more Web 2.0 compatible (still unsure if this is a good thing ). So basically the message of the first part of this blog post is: I’m back (even though I was never really gone).
Enough about me, let’s get to the news:

I got the announce email this morning: Zend Framework 1.6.2 is now available!
It is a bugfix release (check the changes here). I already updated my svn:externals properties and so should you.

And I got another announce email this morning: Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available!
It’s time for lunch, so let me just copy the changes in here from the email:

• New Zend_AMF component
• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0
• New ZendX_JQuery component
• Support for dijit editor
• Metadata API in Zend_Cache
• Google book search API
• Performance enhancements
• Application-wide locale with other i18n enhancements
• File upload form element enhancements

I’m especially curious about the performance enhancements and I’m looking forward to see some new “PHP Framework Speed Comparison Benchmarks” soon.