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.

For some of our long-running processes we use PHP. It makes total sense from our perspective, because we can re-use all our existing business logic from our main PHP web application.

To make things more efficient, I recently started some work on using forks and have a couple of worker processes around.

This application is essentially the core of our transcoder. The parent process would retrieve new jobs from the queue and fire up a number of workers to actually transcode the file. The main problem is that the parent opens up a MySQL connection and fires off some queries. After the child process is done, it actually closes the MySQL connection regardless of if it was actually used or not.

This means I'll have to close all mysql connections before forking, and re-connecting right after. No big deal, but still at least a bit annoying.

<?php

$db  ......

Robert Basic has posted a view helper for the Zend Framework he's developed - one to more correctly handle URLs without dropping the query string information.

Zend Framework's built in URL view helper - Zend_View_Helper_Url - is discarding the query string of the URL, thus breaking some links.

The included helper for URL building formats the output in a slightly unexpected way, so his helper uses this format and, with the help of a few loops and some string appending, spits a "more correct" version out the other side. Complete code and a usage example are included.

Laknath Semage submitted a new blog post he's written up about working with large file uploads in your PHP applications.

If we want to do large file uploads or database updates with PHP there are few configurations to be done to default settings and I'm putting this as a note to myself (I'm always keep forgetting this) as well as to any one who may find this useful like when importing a large backup file through phpMyAdmin.

There's four php.ini settings he recommends checking as well as two values to change if you do have the need to upload a large import file back into a phpMyAdmin installation (ExecTimeLimit, MemoryLimit).

The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.

As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.

Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with ......

Martynas Jusevicius has a new post looking at method overloading in PHP5 - a workaround to make it possible at least.

Method overloading (a feature of object-oriented programing which allows having several class methods with the same name but different signatures) is not implemented in PHP, which is a drawback compared to Java. However, PHP 5 provides a way to imitate overloading by catching calls to "inaccessible methods" with magic method __call.

In his example he uses __call to route the request to the correct version of the constructor (__construct0 or __construct1) based on the number of arguments passed in

回头来看 Beginning Linux Programming 的 shell 部分还是有不少收获，其中一个 dialog 的工具，就激发了我写个简单的选择 ip 的小脚本的想法： 把 ip 分类保存成文件，每个文件中的一行(unix 风格换行符)为一个 ip，然后把下面的脚本的 host_path 值修改成这些 ip 文件所在目录—该目录下不要有其他文件即可。
# list all the host files
host_path=/home/hick/hosts/
# compose the menu tag
menu_tag=''
for file in $(ls $host_path); do
menu_tag="$menu_tag $file $file"
done
# display the host files
dialog --title "QzoneCity host list" --menu "please select the type" 30 30 15 $menu_tag [...]

DevShed continues their series looking at user authentication in PHP applications with this third part of the nine part series. The focus is on the creation of the authentication scripts.

In this article we will continue to discuss the application-wide scripts that we started to talk about in the last article. These special scripts are used by all the scripts and pages of the application. We will continue to look at the func.inc script that has several useful functions defined in it.

Their func.inc script contains the helper functions the rest of the application can use (like isAdmin, isAuthd, genpass and checkEamil). They explain each of the the functions and include an example of them in action. The also include the other half of the pair - the logout script.