eZ publish 3.8.0rc1 is released. The package contains some fixes for bugs found in beta. eZ publish 3.8.0 is expected on the 2nd of May.

Justin Silverton has a very simple post on his blog today about the conversion of a PHP application over to a Windows-native application.

He lists out some of their key benefits ot making the switch and shows a very simple example of creating a "Hello World" window with the scripts.

Yet another fine tutorial has been posted over on PHPit.net today, this time dealing with the use of the cURL library in PHP.

This article doesn't look to be comprehensive on the topic, but does provide a great introduction to the hows and whys of using cURL in PHP. There's no installation procedures here, so you'll need to already have it installed, but other than that, you should have a great grasp on things by the time you're through.

While not directly PHP related, Developer.com has an interesting article covering the use of authentication in your applications.

They discuss a range of authentication types - all the way from simple authentication out to cryptographic and multi-factor authentication. They wrap it up with a look at how you can choose the appropriate authentication methods for your applications as well.

I've seen several sites moving more and more to the next step up from the basic level of authentication up to even just the multi-factor. The more levels of security you can put on your application the better, especially if you're housing any kind of personal data about your users.

I was invited to join the phpDay in Bari, Italy, this Mai. Since I think that Bari in May must be beautiful, I accepted to go there from May 19th until May 21st. I'm pretty much looking forward to this event, since it means to get to know a lot of new people. If you are located in Italy and are interested on PHP, it would be a pleasure, if you join my talk about eZ components there.