Charles Rowe's Blog: The Four Major Benefits of MySQLi
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Charles Rowe shares four reasons/benefits he's come up with that should make you think about choosing MySQLi over the normal MySQL libraries for PHP for your application.   There still seems to be a lot of confusion over the differences between the two extensions despite the length of time that mysqli has been in the wild. I wanted to briefly review the four major benefits of mysqli.   Here's the list   Prepared Statements Secure MySQL connections Multi query Object Oriented Interface   He also includes a few more links to further information (besides the explanation for each of the topics listed above) including an article from the Zend Developer Zone and a tutorial covering making the switch to MySQLi.
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Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.
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Cody Caughlan has created a project that brings one of the popular features of Ruby on Rails to the world of PHP5 - database migrations.   One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of "migrations" for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers. [...] Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.   His framework, Ruckusing Migrations, is a modular framework that makes use of some of the more advanced features of PHP5. It's portable (via an adapter interface) and uses a generic task interface (task files) to load functionality into the framework. There's also plenty of API hooks to allow for a developer to easily create their own custom operations.   Check out the project homepage for more information.
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My column from the Mar 2004 issue of php|architect is now available for free: Security Corner: Shared Hosting
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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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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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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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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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Sandro Groganz has a quick note posted on his blog about the online availability of the text of his article "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition".   I just found that my article entitled "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition" is now available online. It has initially been published in the International PHP Magazine.   He quotes a bit from the introduction to give you an idea of what the article's about, but defers the rest of the article to the International PHP Magazine website. There's lots of good content, screenshots, layouts and plenty of related links as well.
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InfoWorld - MySQL on Wednesday announced general availability of Version 4.1 of its MySQL open source database, which the company is positioning as production-ready for large-scale enterprise usage.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:    I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.   We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.    Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.
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There is a new column from the folks over at PHP Magazine for your enjoyment:
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)
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The Internet Super Hero blog has posted 59 statistics they've generated while they were sting the latest versions of the mysqlnd (native driver) in PHP:   59 - that is the number of statistics collected by mysqlnd. When I started writing this blog post, I hoped it would be easy going describing them. But it wasn't. Some ten days ago, we've had 51 statistics and near zero tests for them. Now we have 59 statistics. And, in a certain way, every figure is a tuning screw in the hand of one who knows what they do.   The list of stats presented include functionality for:   buffered_sets, ps_buffered_sets rows_buffered_from_client_normal, rows_buffered_from_client_ps rows_fetched_from_client_ps_buffered unbuffered_sets, ps_unbuffered_sets rows_fetched_from_client_ps_unbuffered flushed_normal_sets, flushed_ps_sets   Check out the rest of the post for the numbers and results (as well as some images showing the difference between buffered and unbuffered results).
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MySQL on Wednesday announced general availability of Version 4.1 of its MySQL open source database, which the company is positioning as production-ready for large-scale enterprise usage.
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DevShed has started a small series today that seeks to guide you through the world of SQLite as is interfaced through PHP5.   If you use PHP 5 to build web-based applications that access a database, you might want to consider SQLite. A "lighter" option than MySQL, this database may still suit your purposes if you don't need all of MySQL's bells and whistles. This three-part series covers many of SQLite's most useful features.   Their post today, part one talks about the basics of the protocol and how to get started with it in PHP5. Since it's enabled by default, the chances of it being on your installation are great. They only really look at grabbing data from the database in this part, saving pushing data back in for another time.