Andre Liem has posted five simple tips (part one of a two-part series) on ways to optimize your PHP applications.
After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application. There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application. Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I've split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced). This post focuses on the simple part.
His simpler suggestions include using the YSlow extension in Firefox, minification of Javascript and CSS, merging CSS/JS requests, using gzip and avoiding CSS background images.
NETTUTS.com has a new tutorial posted today showing how to combine some simple PHP scripts with the MooTools Javascript library to emulate the popular social site Twitter.
People all over the world love Twitter because of how easy it is to use. All you need to do is type in your current status, click "Update", and you're done. What most people probably don't know is how simple it is to emulate Twitter's functionality. Using PHP, MySQL, and MooTools javascript, you can implement a Twitter-like status system in no time.
Their mini-application (download the source here) creates a basic input box and a list of messages below. The MooTools library is used to send the message back to the PHP script and update the messages list with the latest from the current user. Complete code and screenshots of examples are included.
Maxime Bouroumeau-Fuseau sent over a note about a project that's been started to try to port as much of PHP over to Javascript as possible - the Harmony Framework.
Nearly all of php features are already supported and the process is nearly instantaneous! Harmony also comes with Harmony XML, a Flex MXML like language to create components in xml and php.
The homepage even has a converter that you can use to make the PHP->Javascript transition for your own scripts. The framework is still in a Preview stage, but it already looks promising.
In a quick new entry to his blog, Richard Thomas shows how to integrate the popular jQuery javascript library into your Solar application.
Going to go through a quick walk through of how to use a hacked together version of my old jquery library with solar. You can find the class source files here.
He sets up a callback in the Base controller (that all other controllers extend) for the jQuery calls so that any of the "child" controllers can just call "/controller/jquery" to make jQuery requests.
Recently CIO Magazine had a roundtable interview with representatives from each of the major language players on the web today - Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, Tcl and, of course, PHP.
Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.
Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.
Felix Geisendorfershares another helpful tip for CakePHP users out there - this time dealing with controller variables and Javascript.
If your application requires JavaScript in order to work than you have probably been looking for an efficient way to pass CakePHP controller variables to your scripts. I already mentioned this technique in my talk at CakeFest this year, but here is the full explanation.
His method sets up a new function in the controller that automatically pushes PHP arrays out to a Javascript block in your application's layout. The widget system makes it a simple process.
David Van Couvering has posted about some of his experience with the latest version of the NetBeans editor for some of his PHP and Javascript development work.
Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to help a friend in need who had waded in too deep with a contract he has. He has no database experience, and was trying to customize a Wordpress plugin that uses PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. So I downloaded the daily build of the PHP bundle of NetBeans for 6.5 and started working.
He happily notes that things like syntax highlighting, inline documentation and completion were still there in the PHP bundle as well. He also mentions a few other things that could come in handy for the IDE - ssh tunnel support (see here), an "Add Column Wizard" and a "Insert DLL Wizard".
Reform is a tool that does exactly this. Reform allows you to escape your data for a javascript, xml, html or vbscript (yes it still exists) context. It provides libraries for Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Javascript and ASP. Pretty cool!
The utility is simply included into the application an called via the static methods it adds. His example shows the escaping of some output text in a Javascript string to correctly prevent it from falling into an evil XSS scheme.
Asvin Balloo has posted the second part of his geolocate with PHP tutorial series - using the mapping information gathered from the previous article to plot them on a map.
In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I'll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.
The full code is provided - the PHP to pull the latitude/longitude information from the GeoIP library and the Javascript to get the Google Map to plot the point. You can check out the live demo for an example or just grab the source and try it out for yourself.
The NETTUTS.com website has a new tutorial posted that combines PHP and AJAX (using the the jQuery library specifically) to create a simple dynamic poll.
When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we'll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.
The PHP handles defining the question, answers and the functionality to load, submit and return the current results (number of votes) back to the javascript. The communication between the PHP and javascript is a JSON message made simple thanks to PHP's json_encode function.
