Alex Netkachov's Blog: Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 driver for PHP
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Alex Netkachov has posted some of his own thoughts about Microsoft's recent SQL server 205 driver for PHP:   I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community   He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:The bla.st Blog: Process your URLs in PHP with Apache mod_rewrite and wildcard DNSZend Developer Zone: Book Review : PHP and MySQL by ExampleBen Ramsey's Blog: Zend Executable Debugger Eclipse PluginIlia Alshanetsky's Blog: PHP 5.2.1 RC1 Available for testingphp|architect: 7-Day Promo Fest BeginsNew Earth Online: Detecting Users OnlinePHPBuilder.com: Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to ProfessionalVexxhost.com: Top 5 new (and cool!) features in PHP5 that you probably haven't heard ofFelix Geisendorfer's Blog: A PHP developers guide to JavaScript - Part 1DevShed: Introducing Bridge Classes with PHP 5Book Review: The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web SitesPaul Jones' Blog: New Year's BenchmarksHowToForge.com: Building Apache with PHP,MySQL, OCI8 instant client supportManfred Weber's Blog: Consuming PHP SOAP Webservices with Flash - Part IZend Developer Zone: Who Uses the Zend Framework?
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.   The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.  He talks about a few different aspects:  PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc) RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving) HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 1Developer.com: Threads Versus The Singleton PatternNick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHPDevShed: PHP, MySQL and the PEAR DatabaseDave Dash's Blog: Installing a PHP that can do symfony+doctrine on DreamhostChristopher Jones' Blog: Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on LinuxPHP.net: PHP 5.2.3 ReleasedPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for May 31st, 2007Secunia.com: PHP Integer Overflow Vulnerability and Security BypassPHPBuilder.com: PHP and Regular Expressions 101
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Over on alan@akbkhome.com's weblog, there's a new posting that just might cause a little stir among the PHP users looking forward to PDO becoming a part of PHP's core system, and why it's a bad idea.
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Christopher Jones has posted to his Oracle blog today about the release of a new beta for the PECL Oracle (OCI8) drivers for PHP.   I've created a PECL OCI8 1.3.1 Beta bundle of the code with Connection Pooling support that I mentioned in http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/01/31.  You can get it from http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.  The README contains the details.   Of course, it's still in beta, so any testing and feedback is more than welcome. This bundle also includes several other "non-DRCP related bug fixes" including an issue that caused constant pinging for persistent connections.
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In a recent post Brian Moon points out an advancement in something he's very excited about - the MySQL native driver for PHP.   I have been excited about the MySQL native drive (mysqlnd) since I first heard about it.  They are looking for testers now.   Brian also includes comments about the fact that the driver was originally intended for use in PHP6 and how some people have been talking about a back-port to PHP4 for those still hanging on.   Check out this post from Lukas Smith on the same subject with a bit more information on what the driver is and what it could mean for the PHP community as a whole.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Community News: PHP 5.2.1 ReleasedZend Developer Zone: Zend_Acl / Zend_Auth example scenarioJSLabs Blog:  5 tips for creating high performance web appsRob Allen's Blog: Modules (Zend Framework)Alexander Netkachev's Blog: How to use Zend Framework Controller/Action approach?DevShed: Using Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5 to Work with Online FormsWebCheatSheet.com: Two New Tutorials - Database Export & Sending EmailIlia Alshanetsky's Blog: Month of PHP BugsWindows Skills Blog: Using SQLite as a database backend for a lightweight serverCommunity News: DreamStats "rootpath" File Inclusion Vulnerability IdentifiedPHP.net: PHP Manual UpdatesCommunity News: MySQL native driver for PHP - mysqlndAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Controller/Action versus Folder/PageSymfony Project: Online doc interface improvedFelix Geisendorfer's Blog: Making error handling for Model::save more beautiful in CakePHP
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Cal Evans is attending this year's php/db|works conference up in Toronto and has reported back with his summary of the first day of the conference - "Tutorial Day".   Day One at php|works was dedicated to tutorials. Paul Reinheimer did a 6 hour crash course for those who wanted to take the Zend Certification Test here at the conference. I talked with a three attendees at the Crash Course to get their opinion on how it was going. Cairan Walsh, who is not currently Zend Certified found the course interested although he thought maybe it was a bit too basic.   Cal notes that just about everyone that attended the "Crash Course" was pleased with the contents/teacher/etc. He also mentions his visits to the "Advanced XML and Web Services" and "Extending PHP" tutorials.
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Scott Mattocks is back with the latest installment of the PHP-GTK news, issue number 22.   It's been a while, but I finally have some time to get back to summing up the world of PHP-GTK. Things have slowed down a little in the past few months on the development side but that doesn't mean that the world of PHP-GTK 2 has stood still.   In this edition, there's a call for help for anyone that would want to join the other (4!) developers in working on the PHP-GTK 2 project as well as some general information about the project and its involvement in the community - from talks at php/db|works, International PHP Conference, and the Zend/PHP Conference to the many PHP-GTK-related articles being printed to a new online resource for PHP-GTK tutorials.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Zend Developer Zone: php|works - Day Two WrapupDevShed: Invoice Management in a PHP Invoicing SystemJared White's Blog: Developer Preview 2 of Willowgarden has been released todayZend Developer Zone: php|works - Day One WrapupP&aacute;draic Brady's Blog: PFP II: Return of Patterns For PHPPHPHacks.com: Generate OpenOffice documents with PHPThinkPHP Blog: SQL injections for dummies - and how to fix themILoveJackDaniels.com: Regular Expressions Cheat SheetDevShed: Tracking Website Statistics with PHPJob Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Mid/Sr Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Scott Mattocks' Blog: PHP-GTK News #22Community News: Senza Limiti Acquires Ajax-based PHP Grid, Plans to Open Source ItAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Installing Propel object persistence layer for Web applicationDevShed: Main Methods of the DirectoryIterator Class in PHP 5Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: PHP 5.2.0 RC4 Released!
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Edin Kadribasic has released the latest update for his Win32 builds in the PHP 4.4.x series - PHP 4.4.5-win32 with the MySQL 5.0.22 drivers.   There's a direct download here which contains two files. Drop these top files into your current install folder and you should be good to go (it will overwrite one file and insert another).   Previous versions can be found as tagged on his blog.
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In response to several other posts lately about the PEAR::DB package in PEAR (and things that could be done to improve it), David Coallier got a bit fed up and shared his opinion - "PEAR::DB is deprecated, got it?"   All new features are made into MDB2 and not DB, the only thing that is being done on DB is security fixes. So MDB2 is first of all, faster, smaller (Because of it's driver and modularity), easier, and has more features (LOB handling, Iterator, etc) and better end-user documentation, quite solid docs indeed.   Of course, the comments of the post are full of people arguing to keep it around and others that agree with David, especially in light of a MDB2 driver for the Zend Framework he mentions.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.