Symfony Blog: Is symfony too slow for real-world usage?
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On the symfony blog today, there's a new article looking to dispel some misunderstanding that's come up surrounding the speed of symfony applications and what effect it can have in a real-world situation.    We regularly see framework benchmarks pop up somewhere on the net, comparing symfony to other frameworks, either in PHP or in other languages. The conclusion of some of them is "symfony takes more time than other frameworks to display a 'hello, world', which makes it unsuitable for real-world web applications".   If some benchmarks show that symfony is slower, jumping to the conclusion that symfony is not optimized is a big mistake. [...] If symfony is well implemented (or so we think), then its speed is just the sum of the individual speeds of all the features it includes. Or, to put it differently, Symfony's speed is the consequence of a series of choices that we made to decide whether a feature should or should not make it to the core.    They suggest that the speed of symfony applications does not come as a result of the main portion of the framework, but rather as a choice of the development team as to what parts they wanted to include in the core and what not to. They also point out that, while speed does matter somewhat, especially in larger applications, it shouldn't be highest on the list.
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The International PHP Magazine is back once again with the results from this week's poll that asked "Do you believe the following about PHP?" Options included:  PHP administrators like to compile PHP in Summer Register global is not dead memory_limit is not used PHP applications handle 100 Mb files  And coming out on top with 17.7% of the votes was the "Register globals" option, and coming in right behind was "handle 100Mb files" with 12.7% of the votes.   They've also posted a new poll for this week that asks "Why should a developer use CakePHP?" Check it out and vote for your choice of the six options.
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Felix Geisendorfer is in the process of moving his blog from Wordpress to a customized "light-weight CakePHP replacement" he's developing to be extended later on. His post shares some of the tips he found so far.   In this post I'm simply going to throw out some snippets to show how I'm currently approaching the whole process in order to give both my insight into what works and what doesn't, while also hoping to get some people to share their insight into migrating legacy apps to CakePHP.   The tip in this post is primarily about the database side of things - his porting over of the information from the Wordpress table model to his new customized schema. His code example for the migration is included.
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As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.    He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".   Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.   Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.   My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.    According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.
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From Dotvoid.com, there's a new posting talking about the continued use of PHP4 by developers and hosting companies and how it's effecting the community as a whole.    It is true that the PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch. This is probably, as others have stated, a circular dependency.   As ISP:s are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade. I still think the wrong people are worried. Still PHP 5 is increasing it's share and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. Hopefully before PHP 6 is here but not necessarily.    He continues on, talking about what PHP5 is really about (it's not just the objects!) and things that can help make it an easier sell to those still lagging in a PHP4 world - like the Zend Framework.
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As mentioned both here on the symfony project's website and here on the Zend Developer Zone, a new beta release of the framework has been made - version 1.0 Beta 1.   It's been a long time since the latest beta release (0.7.1915), and even a longer time since the last stable release (0.6.3). Today, we are happy to announce the release of symfony 1.0 Beta 1, and this is a major step towards the version 1.0, which should come shortly.   New features in this release include:  Easier installation and larger compatibility Major performance improvement New unit test library Easier templating Better and more flexible Model layer  Check out these and all of the great features of this popular framework over on their website and grab this latest download from their download page.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll conducted over the week. This time they asked developers what they looked for in a framework.   The options this time were:  An O-O MVC structure ORM / Active Record Good Controller Structure Ajax Interoperability Ability to Incorporate Testing Open Source/Free License Security Good Helpers Scaffolding  With the first option "an OO MVC structure" leading the pack with almost twenty percent. Next in line was (in order of votes): having an Open Source/fre license, bundled with good helpers, good security, and a good controller structure.   Be sure to check out their latest poll too. It asks about security architectures and what developers out there think they should contain.
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DynamicWebPages.de has their latest PHP Usage Statistics posted today. Things just keep looking up for PHP usage - this month it gained a good chunk of domains from last month.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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Dave Dash has posted a configuration that he had shared with him for getting nginx and the symfony framework to work happily together.   I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community.   He includes the config in an easy to use/c&p kind of format so you can drop it into your install and get it up and running quick.
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Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:    The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.   Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.    He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").
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In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).   IÃ¢ÂÂve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, itÃ¢ÂÂs probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.   Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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The latest issue of php|architect magaizne has been released today - September 2006.   Highlights in this issue include:  "Is PHP 5 really slower than PHP 4?" by Andi Gutmans and Dmitry Stogov "State of the PEAR" contributed by Aaron Wormus, a walkthrough of the history of PEAR "Know Your Stuff" from Philip Olson, looking at the PHP Manual "Desperately Seeking Susan" by Tom Gidden, a look at the basics of creating a search engine and, of course the Security Corner (Ilia Alshanetsky) is back with part two of the look at configuration in PHP   ...and much more.   You can either pick up this issue by itself (about $4.20 USD) or as a part of a shiny, new subscription (about $35.00 USD).
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Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".   I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.   He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).   He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.
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As mentioned by Richard Heyes, there's a new blog post from Larry Garfield talking about the death of PHP4, how the community has responded to it and some of his own thoughts on the matter.   The problem is the source for that "everyone" [is still using PHP4] claim. The most widely referenced stats are the Nexen stats, and according to them 70%+ of the world still uses PHP 4. Horrors!   He takes a closer look at the stats and comes up with a slightly different sort of conclusion that the stats can't really measure. They can show the server-based usage measurements of PHP4 vs PHP5, but they can't show the number of developers behind each of them.  According to Larry:  Even if we assume that 70% of PHP developers are using 70% of random servers running PHP, and that they're all using proprietary, one-off applications on a server with a sysadmin who refuses to upgrade at a company that has no support contract with any distribution vendor... Where are they?