ryan kennedy’s blog

Aside from having an awesome last name, Niall also has a nice writeup on Rasmus’ PHP presentation at OSCON. Rasmus breaks down taking an application from 17 requests per second to 1700 requests per second. Afterwards, he dives into web services in PHP, both accessing them and publishing them.

The presentation is good, very step by step with a lot of sample code along the way so you can see exactly what Rasmus is talking about. And there’s no quantum leaps, it takes several small iterations before he finally gets the application from 17 to 1700.

There are things in the PHP language that annoy me, however I can’t ignore the fact that when I sit down to write PHP things just get done. There’s no build setup process to get started (assuming you already have a web server running PHP). Just open a file and start typing. There’s no edit-compile-run cycle, it’s just edit-run (unless, of course, you’re writing an extension). It also features some very classy OOP features, such as using the __call() method for overloading. I’ve been using that a lot lately to build some fun stuff.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s been a recent development sure to make any low-level PHP developer very happy. Sara Golemon (now a Yahoo!) has released her excellent book, Extending and Embedding PHP. For any of you who have cursed the extension documentation on the Zend website, GO BUY THIS BOOK. It’s basically what Zend should have provided since day one. Sara’s done a very nice job explaining the Zend lifecycle and how you can easily hook into it.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 10:12 am and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.