I’m actually pretty excited about PHP 5.4’s release. I still manage to write a fair amount of PHP these days. I suspect it will be quite some time until I have enough PHP 5.4 targets to utilize some of the newer features like Traits and the short array syntax, but that’s OK. Performance and memory […]
Posts Tagged ‘php’
PHP’s include_once() Is Insanely Expensive
I’ve always heard the include_once() and require_once() functions were computationally expensive in PHP, but I never knew how much. I tested the following out on my i7 2010 MacBook Pro using PHP 5.3.4 as shipped by Apple. This first test uses include_once() to keep track of how often a file is included: $includes = Array(); […]
PHP 5.3.4 Changes rand(), Filled My Error Log, Spikes Load
I ran into a peculiar situation with a PHP web application that went from working for several years without incident to suddenly resulting in timeouts and spiking the load on my server. Some investigation traced it back to a seemingly benign and obscure change to PHP’s rand() implementation between 5.3.3 and 5.3.4. To summarize several […]
Another Brick In The Facebook Wall
I ran across the problem recently trying to write to a users wall using the Facebook API. The Facebook documentation is hardly sane as it’s a mix of languages, not entirely up to date, and lacks good examples. The error messages are hardly ideal either. “A session key is required” at least leads me in […]
Facebook’s HipHop For PHP
I mentioned the other day that Facebook was about to open source a method for speeding up PHP. Today they announced HipHop a code transformation tool that converts PHP into C++ and compiles using g++. There is apparently a server component to this strategy as well. I’m slightly skeptical that this approach will have much […]
Facebook’s New PHP “Runtime”
According to SDTimes Facebook is about to release a new open source project where it has either re-written the PHP Runtime (unlikely) or built a PHP compiler (more likely). There is another possibility. It could be a Zend extension acting as an opcode cache (APC, XCache, etc.) and a FastCGI replacement. It’s also possible they […]
PHP Namespacing
The PHP folks have finally announced that PHP will get namespacing in the form of ‘\‘. The universal escape character. They really should have went with the standard ‘::‘ or ‘:::‘. Using ‘\‘ is going to work well. I was thinking something like this would be more appropriate (background on compatibility here): ………………………………..__………………………………………… ………………………..,-~*`¯lllllll`*~,…………………………………… …………………..,-~*`lllllllllllllllllllllllllll¯`*-,……………………………… […]
Embedded JavaScript For Web 3.0
John Resig has an interesting blog post on embedded JavaScript. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a little while. It would be awesome to see a PHP extension to embed SpiderMonkey into PHP. As far as I’m aware Facebook is the only one that’s taken a step in that direction with FBJS, which uses […]
Summer Of Code 2008
Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective: Adium Data Detectors for Adium Dojo Foundation Native cryptography API for Google Gears Dojo-Charting improvements Dojo GFX Enhancement FFmpeg AAC-LC Encoder MLP/TrueHD encoder Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg Gallery Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based […]
The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite
So the format war of Blue-ray vs. HD-DVD is over. There are still several other rather significant battles going on in the tech world right now that aren’t Microsoft vs. Apple or Yahoo vs. Google. For example: Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism vs. Microsoft Silverlight Google Gears vs. HTML5 Offline support Android vs. iPhone SDK […]