Nexen.net: PHPInfo() Stats - Part 2
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Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.   I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.   You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).
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In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:   Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.   After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.    Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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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:Reinhold Weber's Blog: 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmerScott Klarr's Blog: PHP Cheat SheetsDeveloperTutorials.com: Building Desktop Applications in PHPPadraic Brady's Blog: The Zend Framework and Microformats: Zend_Microformat ProposedCommunity News: GoPHP5 Project Wraps UpJob Posting: Technology Resources, Inc Seeks Senior PHP Developer (New York, NY)Job Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Sr. Systems Analyst/Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Community News: Forage - A Search Abstraction LayerCommunity News: php|architect Launches C7Y Site (News/Podcast/Forums)Richard Heyes' Blog: SMTP for PHP 5
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DevShed continues their tutorial series looking at working with PHP and databases today with more excerpted material from the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP, Second Edition" (by Kevin Tatroe, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Peter MacIntyre).   Picking up from where we left off last week, we'll be discussing shortcuts, query responses, metadata, and more.   They start off looking at shortcuts, those handy things the PEAR DB package offers to make life simpler (like getRow and getAssoc) before moving on to how to get the details about the response itself (like affectedRows and tableInfo). Next up is working with the metadata (using getListOf) and, finally, a sample application to tie them all together.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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Nexen.net has posted the PHP statistics update for the month of August 2006:   Here is the evolution graphic for PHP, in August 2006. To learn about the methodology, see la section phpversion. 15 millions servers were surveyed during August, and 8,2 were used for the stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP or domain parkings were not considered.   PHP's overall adoption dipped down a bit this month, mostly due to the comination of many other smaller languages rising in popularity. All the while, though, PHP5 adoption is soaring, even gaining back ground it lost last month, and PHP 4.4 is growing more in popularity of the 4.x series versions, almost overtaking 4.3.   The complete stats are available here and the details behind them are here.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:aFilesSmiley GeneratorlangMerge PicturesKeyword SuggestFuseBox ManagerSite Guide
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This is a followup on Marco Tablini's discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.
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Hannes Magnusson has posted about more updates that are being made to the PHP.net website today, including an upgrade to the "conference teaser" patch and the introduction of a new box to like directly to the latest releases on the front page.    Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...   What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?    He wants your feedback on this last point - would having an XML feed for just the version info be that useful? Or would it just be yet another RSS feed to add to the list to keep up with the new PHP releases?
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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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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Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.   There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:  AJAX Optimization talks  An overview of some Flickr Stats Google's mashup offerings An introduction to  and some talk of benchmarking Ajax  Check out the full post though - it's jam-packed with links and some great event information.
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DevShed continues their series covering SQLite in PHP5 today with the final tutorial - "Additional Methods for Using SQLite with PHP 5":   The list of additional features offered by SQLite is really impressive. Therefore, in this last article of the series, I'll be taking an in-depth look at them. This will complete our analysis of this excellent RDBMS integrated with PHP 5.   First up is a look at the usage of the seek and lastInsertRowid functions followed by the changes and queryExec methods. They show how to use the createFunction method and show one of the more advanced features of SQLite - creating a database that only exists in the server's memory.