It’s that time of the year again (the first day) when the idea of 2008 still seems shiny new and exciting to behold on your calendar. Go on, admit it, seeing 2008 gives you an anticipatory thrill.

It’s now about two years since I shed the pseudonym Maugrim and I now have a 3 in 5 chance that any particular website won’t die when I enter a-acute characters for my real name into a web form. Now that’s real progress! Let’s get it up to 4 in 5 this year!

Looking back it’s been a fairly good year. I became far more involved in open source projects including my own meagre offerings. I’ve seen the rise of the Zend Framework and it’s gradual evolution into a praise worthy framework – even its adoption of some of my own proposals. I finished my qualifications as a Chartered Accountant here in Ireland. I bit the bullet and kickstarted three projects to hopefully push and prod some improved TDD/BDD practices (PHPSpec, PHPMock and PHPMutagen). I became the Irish Representative on the OpenID Europe Foundation and did a ton of work to be finished soon on writing a PHP5 library for OpenID and the Yadis Protocol. As usual I typed too much on the Devnetwork Forums ;) – looking for another Devnet Award!. I even refreshed my C knowledge which I’ve barely used since 2000 and started writing a small wrapper for the Windows Snarl API. Oh, and I learned Ruby which was quite an experience and I even managed to avoid Rails as a largely pointless exercise. Ruby without Rails is quite cool enough. I also had a few articles published on Zend’s Devzone.

My outlook for 2008 is bright. There’s a few projects in open source which will become stable and enter their maintenance mode (see above). I’ll be working with the Zend Framework more on large projects, including a reentry to PHP game development. I have high hopes of attending a few conferences during the year since I should have a less hectic year. Maybe one day I’ll even give in and create a Facebook account ;) .

The coolest stuff for PHP has no doubt been already covered. PHP 5.3 is incoming with namespaces which will be welcome. PHP6 continues progressing which I’m really looking forward to since I absolutely hate all the UCS4 gynastics I currently indulge in for parsing characters. Zend Framework should hit another major release version. Things seem on track on a much improved testing/specing landscape in PHP – PHPUnit 4 with PHPMock & Hamcrest, SimpleTest for PHP5, and my own and Travis’ PHPSpec for Behaviour-Driven Development. I’m sure Ruby users will also realise why a Windows Snarl API is applicable here too ;) . And PHPT for PEAR2 is also coming along very nicely under Travis Swicegood. I’m also looking forward to seeing how Adobe AIR influences web apps this year. After using Spaz (a pretty good poster child for AIR) by Ed Finkler there’s a lot of potential there for desktop integration to web application APIs.

Here’s to 2008!