Matthew Turland has this new blog post looking at some benchmarks he's generated for a group of mainstream PHP HTTP clients:
One of the interesting bits of research that I've done is benchmarking various mainstream PHP HTTP clients. Of course, we all know that there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and benchmarks, so take these with a grain of salt.
He ran them on his Sony Viao on Ubuntu with a stock PHP5 package. The tested packages were the pecl_http extension, the streams http wrapper, curl integration into PHP 5, PEAR::HTTP Client class and the Zend_Http_Client component. He includes the code he used for both a basic request and for something slightly more complex (posting form data). He used the XDebug and KCachegrind combination to produce the results.
AS Evan Sims mentions on his blog today, Automattic has released a version of WordPress for the iPhone (a client to connect to your remote blogging system).
There are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I'd tried left a lot to be desired.
He noes that the application is "polished, official and completely native" and includes features that allow you to take a picture with the phone's camera and embed it directly into the post you're writing. Check out the sample video of it in action on an iPhone. You can download it from the App Store for free.
In his keynote this morning Andi Gutmans announced some other big news (see here for the other announcement) at the php|tek conference currently being held in Chicago - that Zend and the Dojo framework were teaming up to provide an "out-of-the-box" Ajax solution included with the Zend Framework.
Several members of the community have already blogged about it including:
this FAQ from the Zend Developer Zone detailing the partnership
So far, all of the comments have been good and the partnership has been well received. Matthew included in hist post a few of the places they're already planning on "ajaxing" in the Zend Framework (including the forms and the JSON-RPC server).
In a new article from PHPBuilder.com.au today, they talk about the "powerhouse of web services", SOAP, and how to get started working with it in PHP.
You've tried your hand at building mashups, experimented with a few RESTful Web services, maybe even started your own. Sure, you've got data sharing working. But how do you make your Web applications really talk to each other? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take your Web applications to the next level with SOAP.
They opt to go with the NuSOAP method to consume another service and create your own simple one. They include a few code examples for either side and a (very) brief look at doing some debugging with what NuSOAP has to offer. One thing to note - if you have PHP5's SOAP extension compiled in and working, NuSOAP will throw an error about redeclaring a class name. This is because of a conflict between the naming of the SOAP extension's methods and NuSOAP.
Christopher Jones has posted about the latest Instant Client release for the Intel chips running OS X:
Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.
The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.
The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.
Korynn Bohn has posted a new tutorial/article on the Zend Developer Zone website that talks about (and advocates for) web services.
Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.
He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.
The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.
Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.
You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.
Christopher Jones talks today on his blog about a bug he's just corrected and integrated into the release of the Oracle Instant Client that lets PHP correctly take advantage of the temporary LOBS functionality.
When PHP is done with the temporary LOB, it needs to tell Oracle to destroy it. If this isn't done, then the temporary LOB will hang around using DB space until the connection is closed. I just merged a fix worked on by Krishna Mohan and myself for bug 43497.
Example code is included showing two instances of its use - a normal use that frees the memory correctly and the other showing how to create the temporary lob to hold the data as needed.
On his blog today, Samisa Abeysinghe points out a library that can be used to trace the SOAP messages going back and forth between your client and server - the WSO2 Web services framework for PHP.
The Web services client class, WSClient has two methods for this, getLastRequest() and getLastResponse(). After calling the request() method of the client instance, you can call any of those methods to gain access to the messages.
Simple example code is included showing how to grab that information from the client object. If you're looking for a way to get the WSF/PHP functionality installed on your system, check out this step-by-step tutorial on using the PECL tool to create and install the packages to your PHP setup.
