Archive for category PHP

PHP: Performance Improvement Tips

This post covers some performance improvement tips by showing merits or demerits of various coding practices in PHP. While developing small websites or projects which are not meant to be maintained for longer period of time it's okey it we don't care about all this performance improvement and so on. But while we are into the development of some product or project which are going to be maintained for longer period of time then it is required that we take care of small things from the beginning. Initially we may feel that benefits are not drastic but when we have large amount of user base then all small and minor things matters.

In PHP we have always so many ways to do things. During development of PHP as a language, developer community/team added up many functions and features (due to requests..!) in the language and some of them might be redundant, so we have sometimes many ways to solve one problem. Here sometimes due to not knowing what is the best way to solve the problem, we use the solution which we already know or we are more familiar with. Sometimes as a developer we create habit of doing something in particular way for always. Please read on to know whether you are already aware of this tips, which could improve performance of your php application. (Even if it is micro improvement it matters..!) Read the rest of this entry »

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Symfony 1.1 RC1 Released

There are some great news for symphony lovers. Symfony 1.1 is now in it’s release candidate stage. At the same time the biggest news is that after Yahoo! Bookmarks now Yahoo! has chose symphony to rewrite Yahoo! Answers..! That sounds great that symfony is making it’s stand higher and higher by being chosen for developing enterprise level application. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

Dustin Whittle from Yahoo! has presented a case study on redeveloping Y! Answers with symfony and Yahoo!’s decision for choosing symfony as their development. Download presentation Yahoo! Answers - The Symfony way..!

These are some of the great and most joyful moments for Team symfony, I would like to congratulate symfony team for their great work.

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Top Open Source PHP Frameworks

After RoR there are lot many frameworks in PHP which are either inspired by it or based on MVC pattern. Today I am throwing some light on some of it, which I came across (I mean heard) during my development experience in PHP. Here I am talking about next generation Open Source PHP frameworks which I came across.

Symfony: Now it is more then 2 year old project and seems to be quite complete in the sense of feature and documentation. Symfony has quite rich documentation and community support. Their development seems to be really active as I see many change-sets getting committed and bugs getting fixed every Monday. Today Symfony 1.0.12 is released and Symfony 1.1 is on the way to getting released. I have not tried any project with Symfony as of yet but have been keeping a close eye on their activity since long and now when 1.1 release is near thinking of start something with it. 1.1 version will come with quite a lot welcome changes and I am looking further to it. Fabien Potencier and his team gave great contribution to the PHP world by gifting Symfony framework.

Symfony is MVC architecture based PHP framework. It is more of less inspired by Majovi and Ruby on Rails. Symfony team is not trying to reinvent the wheel and framework uses many opensource components in their base. For beginners it is little difficult to begin with Symfony but great deal of documentation and 21 days of askeet tutorials will help them out really.

I believe Symfony is really enterprise level framework. It has great deal of documentation and The Book (Definitive guide to Symfony - Open source) Read the rest of this entry »

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My experiences with SOAP Web-service PHP vs .NET

Recently I have been developing web-services for integration of one of our flagship product to other POS software at Meditab Software. My official working platform is PHP and we have been developing web services for communication between our products to internal web applications in the past but it was like "We understand what we speak..!" as we have not been dealing with any external entity during these communications the input parameters used to be simple data-types and for output we understand what we give back using single simple data-type.

When I read requirement specification for the web service which I have developed recently I thought I could finish it in a day or two as I have been developing web-services recently. I went on and started and went into trouble with "complexType" declaration in WSDL. I was having C# example to work with provided by the company which was going to use my webservice. I tried that but the thing is when you use Microsoft ASP.NET platform to develop web services what developer needs to is just expose their method with [WebMethod] attribute and you are done! All hardwork and complex WSDL generation will be done by .NET framework. But when it comes to PHP you gotta deal with WSDL generation and make sure you do it perfectly or else your web-service won't work. Read the rest of this entry »

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Beginner’s Resources for PHP-MySQL Development

Sometimes developer’s don’t find the perfect startup environment for PHP development when they are in their initial stage. Setting up PHP with Apache could be difficult for beginner if he don’t know how to modify httpd.config or php.ini settings. In my initial stages I have installed PHP with IIS and then Apache and later even tried EasyPHP too. But EasyPHP has no release for PHP5, so that made me down. Never mind after some time I came across a PHP, MySQL and Apache package with which I fall in love. It is truly zero configuration installation to start PHP, MySQL development with Apache over any platform including Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X. The other good alternate to that is WAMP Server if you are using Windows for development.

XAMPP or WAMPSERVER both are good development environment for novice or experienced developers when want zero configuration LAMP/WAMP environment. You can even use it for production server with modifications in some of security measures and optimizing MySQL and PHP settings as per your server configuration (mainly memory). Read the rest of this entry »

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