Professional PHP

Larry Garfield has an interesting set of benchmarks covering many of PHP’s magic methods. His results correspond pretty well to my own benchmarks in the area. The thing to take away is that its not necessarily the overhead of the magic methods, but rather what you do inside them. Its hard to [...]

Google engineer Aaron Hopkins wrote a good article on page loading times (via Harry). He talks about the impact of AJAX on page load times, focusing on connection limits, latency and the large number of external objects on your typical AJAX page. He offers a variety of tips on improving page [...]

Derick Rethans has posted the notes from the recent PHP 6 meeting in Paris. All I can say is wow! PHP has a bright future. Good job guys.
I’ve also been impressed with the new upgrade notes for 5.1. Good job there, too.
I’ve read over the whole thing and I like what [...]

Following up on the Backward compatibilty and web host adoption of PHP 5 post from two weeks ago, I got a pretty good education about the problem with taking a reference of $this. The best summary is in this bug report.
It comes down to the fact that allowing references to be taken of $this [...]

Simple Thoughts blog has a post on PHP development from a Java architects eyes. This post highlights the paradigm difference between programming in PHP and programming in Java:

In PHP multi-threaded programming using ticks is rather primitive, to put it politely. I couldn’t find any way to share data between multiple invocations of the script, [...]

I wrote earlier about flawed microbenchmarks. Today on sitepoint, there was a post on the performance of single versus double quotes in PHP based on a microbenchmark:

The reasoning behind this speedup is that when the PHP compiler encounters a string constant beginning with a double quote, the string itself must be parsed and special [...]

Troutgirl seems to have hit a hot button in her blog about Friendstar switching from JSP to PHP. This story has been picked up by a variety of bloggers. I originally saw it from Dynamically typed. Russell Beattie Notebook has some good discussion on the topic. Joe Grossberg talks about a redirection problems [...]