A good way to measure the health of any given thing is to measure its activity (except bridges… I tend to get nervous when bridges start moving on their own). In this sense, PHP is very much alive and the community is showing it off with two fantastic events this fall that will light up Europe in a frenzy knowledge exchange and PHP-related festivities!

Google Labs, in cooperation with Google Code University, has released a new microblogging tool called Jarlsberg, and like its namesake cheese, it’s full of holes. Security holes. Google hopes you use Jarlsberg to learn best practices on how to make your own software more secure.

Fabien Potencier and other international speakers made their talks at phpDay 2010, which are now available online.

The FTW! Competition (Canadian PHP on Windows Contest) deadline is May 17th 8am. If you have a PHP application running on Windows and IIS, submit your app to this competition today.

Adobe is hosting a series of training classes for PHP developers looking to get into Flash Builder. If you want to learn more about Flash Builder 4 and Flex, click on inside and we’ll give you the details.

CMS Expo, held annually, is a conference that brings together representatives from prominent Open Source CMS systems along with domain experts and even some proprietary tool vendors.

PostgreSQL has roughly one-quarter of the market share of MySQL, and I’d guess that PHP projects favor MySQL even more. But PostgreSQL deserves some love from the PHP community too. PostgreSQL is open source with a simpler license that’s closer to PHP’s license. As RDBMS technology, PostgreSQL has always been more advanced than MySQL. Don’t you wish MySQL supported check constraints? Sequences? Recursive queries, common table expressions, and window functions?

Let’s take a look at the international speakers of 2010’s edition of the phpDay conference in Italy, and at the variety of covered topics.