Marco Tabini pointed today to an article on the Google Code titled Let's make the web faster, PHP performance tips. The article point to some coding tips written by Google webmaster Eric Higgins about variables usage, echo, if/switch cases ...

this article relates primarily to what are usually termed "micro" optimizations—that is, small tweaks that you can make to your code to yield some measure of improvement in your performance or, as is the case with a number of the suggestion in the post by Eric Higgins, in the readability of your code

The idea of using such tips without understanding them is not useful at all, especially that this is only micro optimizations only as Marco pointed in his article. It will be more useful if these guides teaches developers to program correctly and so they can use each functions in its correct place.

Posted by Hatem at 10:56 PM to General | Tips | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, Pádraic Brady, posted on his blog The Art Of Deception Or Publishing PHP6 Books pointing mainly to a book published by wrox titled Professional PHP 6. If unicode is most awaited feature in PHP6, all other features have been implemented in 5.2 and 5.3

Shame on all publishers guilty of this silliness. To anyone in the market for a PHP book, stick to the bargain bins and second hand stores until a genuine PHP 5.3 book is released (that actually covers PHP 5.3's new features mind!). The real PHP6 books are probably years away but PHP 5.3 looks to be a great release with plenty of new features..next Tuesday!

Today I was reading on his blog also, a response from Wrox publishing. Wrox proved that they are listening and that's what make them one of the best publishers for professional technical books. Jim Minatel, Associate Publisher - wrox, wrote in an email to Pádraic :

...First, I've asked the team involved with Beginning PHP6 scheduled to ship to the printer this week to pull that book back, to read your post and the subsequent twitter discussion and to make sure we aren't making the same mistake a third time. I want the author and editors to provide a level of confidence that the PHP6 features that should be covered are, that the discussion of the current state of PHP6 is accurate, and the that the title, subtitle, and marketing copy on the book and online accurately reflects what is and isn't covered...

Pádraic you are not the only one impressed with wrox, I'm sure !

Posted by Hatem at 10:40 PM to Books | General | Permalink | Comments (0)

php|architect released today June 2009 edition and this month many authors are sharing their framework choices. Five PHP Frameworks in the list : Xataface, sierra-php, Madeam, Zend Framework, and CodeIgniter. In this edition also Derick Rethans discuss performance implications of the garbage collection mechanism in PHP 5.3, which will be released in the next days.

If you are interested about telephony and VoiceXML you should also have a look on VoicePHP article by Yusuf Motiwala, which introduce to this new telephony solution by TringMe.Finally Arne Blankerts talk about XSS in the security column mentioning twitter and myspace experience and of course you are all invited to check and recheck your code - In case you want to enjoy your vacations ! Don't miss the exit(); column of Marco Places, People, Times.

Posted by Hatem at 7:31 AM to Magazines | PHP Frameworks | Permalink | Comments (0)

SourceForge.net 2009 Community Choice Awards Nominations already started and if you did not voted you still have time to cast your vote for your fav project. The winners will be announced at a party, held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA, starting at 6:00 pm PT on the night of July 23rd, during the week of OSCON - according to sourceforge press release. This year 8 Projects powered by PHP are finalist : XAMPP, Symfony, phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Flow3, vTiger CRM, OrangeHRM and Joomla Security Scanner.

Best project category

XAMPP is probably the easiest way to get a complete cross-platform web stack consisting of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

We should win because we help beginners, educators, and everyone else to get into today's most important Internet technologies.

Symfony is a web framework that helps developing better, secure, and maintainable websites faster with PHP.

We should win because we fill the gap between the Open-Source world and what the enterprise needs in PHP.

Continue reading "Sourceforge Community Choice Awards, Cast your Vote for PHP" »

Posted by Hatem at 5:28 AM to Dev Tools | General | MySQL | PHP Frameworks | Permalink | Comments (0)

Techportal published today a new article written by Lorna Mitchell on the new beta Memcached Extension for PHP.

This article looks at how to obtain and work with the new extension, and also shows off a couple of the new features it includes

Lorna invite you to install the beta from pecl and discover new features, interesting for example if you are implementing social features to use getmulti instead of retrieving items one by one from cache. You will find sample code and link to download libmemcached in comments if you don't have it already.

Although the extension is currently in beta, it is shaping up nicely and is well worth a look for anyone working with memcache or looking to begin to work with it. I think we’ll see this being adopted pretty quickly as even without the additional functionality, its performance is an improvement on the existing extension.

Posted by Hatem at 12:42 PM to Performance | Tips | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fabien, founder of Sensio and lead developer of the symfony framework, posted a short and very useful code for tweeting from PHP. Why you need to use lots of libraries while you can tweet easily ?

function tweet($message, $username, $password) { $context = stream_context_create(array( 'http' => array( 'method' => 'POST', 'header' => sprintf("Authorization: Basic %s\r\n", base64_encode($username.':'.$password)). "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n", 'content' => http_build_query(array('status' => $message)), 'timeout' => 5, ), )); $ret = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml', false, $context); return false !== $ret; }

You can simply call it using :

tweet('From PHP, yeah...', 'usernamet', 'password');

Merci Fab.

Posted by Hatem at 9:05 AM to Tips | Permalink | Comments (0)