Here are the most important news items we have published in 1999 on PHP.net.
[03-Dec-1999] It is scheduled to land on Mars at 12:14 PM Pacific time December 3 and PHP is helping to bring the experience to the world. The web site www.marspolarlander.com is powered by a combination of PHP, MySQL and Perl scripts. There is an architecture description here. This architecture document doesn't say very much about PHP other than the fact that PHP is used as the Web scripting language, but it has an interesting description of how they built a large scaleable system and it proves nicely that PHP is up to the task of being part of such a large-scale deployment.
[17-Nov-1999] Three months after PHP 4.0 Beta 2 was released, Beta 3 is finally here. This release has a lot of changes, including a "pure" automake/libtool-based build system, Java support and lots of other stuff. All 4.0 beta users are encouraged to upgrade.
[31-Jul-1999] PHP is a Finalist in the LinuxWorld Editors' Choice Awards to be presented on Aug.11 in San Jose, CA. PHP is up against QT from Troll Tech in the "Programming Library/Tools" category.
[23-Jul-1999] The long awaited beta of the new generation of PHP is here.
[02-Jul-1999] Rasmus Lerdorf and Jim Winstead will be giving a pair of three-hour tutorials at O'Reilly's Open Source Software Convention on August 21, 1999, in Monterey, California.
[27-Jun-1999] Hot on the heels of 3.0.10, along comes another release to fix a few problems on Windows and some Unix platforms. If 3.0.10 worked for you, there's probably no need to upgrade. 3.0.10 featured bug fixes, including the last of the fsockopen() and URL fopen() problems, we hope. The dbm database abstraction layer had the mode flag for dba_open() brought into line with dbm_open(), which means "w" will not create a non-existent database (use "c" instead). The documentation has also been moved into its own repository, and the generated HTML documentation is included in the tar.gz instead of the SGML source. For a more complete list of all of the changes, see the ChangeLog.
[06-June-1999] More bug fixes, including many in the OCI8 module, and an important fix for fgets() on socket connections. Also added support for PCRE (Perl-compatible Regular Expressions library), t1lib (PostScript Type-1 fonts with GD), and mhash. For a more complete list of all of the changes, see the ChangeLog.
[12-May-1999] Get ready for a wave of PHP related books to hit the shelves! We don't know exactly how many there are going to be yet, but two are already available.
[04-Jan-1999] Zend, a new optimized engine for PHP has been announced. Visit the Zend Web site for more information!