Slashdot Mirror

What does it mean finally and complete?

The Zend compiler is quite complete and AFAIR for flat-fee. Do you mean that it does not produce binaries but byte-code? Then neither Java nor CMUCL have compilers...

The biggest issues developers have with the PHP compilation:

1. They don't want to sell their sources unobfuscated;
2. They want to gain some optimization speed eliminating the parsing (this can also be achieved by caching);

Mod parent up, this person appears to be none other than Andi Gutmans, also known as the ND in ZEND, co-creator of PHP!

My mistake. I got this competition mixed up with the official PHP5 competition

fopen() can open local files & URLs - look at the http:// example:
fopen()

fgets() will read in data from the steam - you can pick how many bytes you want to read in:
fgets()

Dont forget to use fclose() afterwards!

When you get those functions working, it's just a matter of interpreting the content returned. PHP has many useful string functions - many more than ASP does.

These functions are analogous to using a Microsoft.XMLHTTP object:
myXMLHTTPObject.Open "GET", someURL

The PHP and ASP way are both neat ways to read content from [X]HTML pages on other servers (the weather, share prices, etc) - although it might not be 100% ethical!

Hope this helps... I have nothing better to do while I wait for Fedora Core 2 to be delivered. Oh wait, I do... I'm at work reading Slashdot!

I'm not sure exactly what Dreamweaver library files are (you might want to explain that in your article next time, hint hint), but I'm assuming they are used to make templates and dynamic content. In that case, do not use proprietary tools; use either SSI or a scripting language (go PHP!).

Here are the tools I use for web design:

Source editing: Crimson Editor, a freely available text editor that supports syntax coloring and just about anything you'd ever want in a text editor. Somewhat well-designed GUI and very small (fits on a floppy).

PHP editing: Crimson Editor (listed above), and Zend for larger projects

Page design: Photoshop/Imageready and (for more content-oriented pages) Illustrator

HTML Editing: Adobe Golive CS. I know I'm sounding like an Adobe fanboy here, but GoLive really kicks ass. It has a steep learning curve, in that it's slightly harder to pick up than Dreamweaver, but after spending a few hours with it, you'll love it. Free trial available, I believe.

Of course, this is all proprietary software, and that's how things are in the design world. With development, you have a little freedom, but with design, you're locked into the Big Four (Adobe/Macromedia/Corel/Quark) and the last two are on its last legs.

Of course it is not stable enough for production use - but it's stable enough for start porting your software for PHP5. There's some signifient (and GREAT) improvements in object model which our company has found very useful. With this RC1 release, we'll start new bleeding edge branch to port our 100 000 lined object oriented software to PHP5.

There's some good changes for example that constructor is always ___constructor(), of course drawback in porting is that you need to change it to all of your classes. But in long term it's good since you don't need to change constructor names every time you change name of class (for some reason).

Small tip for making your constructors PHP5 compatible:

function __constructor($foo) {
$this->oldClassConstructor($foo);
}

function oldClassConstructor($foo} {
return $foo;
}

This makes constructor PHP5 complitant with same time keeping your old PHP4 constructor working.

PHP5 also has private functions,classes,variables and other nifty stuff :-)

http://www.zend.com has an article about changes in object model...

cheers!

All the OO features are nice, but what's really missing in PHP are some critical "enteprise" features, like true connection pooling (and no, pconnect doesn't count)

I don't know offhand, but I wonder if any of the Zend stuff does that kind of thing.

- Scott

You obviously haven't read the full details

What's new in PHP5

14. Class type hints

Function declarations may include class type hints for their parameters. If the functions are called with an incorrect class type an error occurs. function expectsMyClass(MyClass $obj) { } jbw

Several ways. I personally use APC. Zend has a few products that speed up PHP performance.

Both Perl and PHP already have Z39.50 support to connect to full-text search engines.

Might make a better team than JSP and Java. Check this out. Zend and Sun are working together on a java specification request that will interwork the easy development of PHP as a web front end to the powerful business logic systems that java provides. Sure you can do SOAP server with PHP, but that's not as good as having a SOAP server with Java (or any other sort of server) and slapping a PHP web interface on top of it. I can't wait until it's ready.

You're very right that doing this naively will result in just what you describe. PHP will parse all those files to an internal opcode format, then execute that. What you want is for it to cache the opcode so it doesn't have to re-read/parse/compile the .php files until they change on disk. The best way to do this is with the Zend Optimizer, which is written by the same people who write the PHP engine. It's free as in beer and comes only as a binary. If you want free as in speech as well, search for "php accelerator", "phpa", "mmcache", and I'm sure there are more. (I will warn you that I've had a bad experience with one of the non-Zend caches where it failed unpredictably when the server handled multiple requests simultaneously. Because that almost never happened on our testing server, we didn't notice until it was on the production server and causing havoc. Test thoroughly. :)) All of these caches require minimal setup (though you will need root) and work automagically. With a functioning cache, most requests will actually be much faster if you include all your libraries from base.inc or whatnot, since all the opcodes were cached after the first request. HTH

It's no book, but you can find the worst practices here here and here.

It's no book, but you can find the worst practices here here and here.

It's no book, but you can find the worst practices here here and here.

Just because a project/product is GPL doesn't mean that you can't market it. There are lots of business models behind open source software, just ask the folks at RedHat or Zend. Lowering the barriers to adoption by making distribution essentially free (cost of bandwidth) and no up-front expense is a great marketing tool, actually. Ask your university's marketroid advocates the following question: would RedHat and/or PHP be here today and be the most popular tools of their kind, if they had to reach their userbase by traditional marketing means and expenditures?

The APC Cache is no longer being developed (check the last build date: August 25, 2001) and is not the best free compilation system.

The best free solution is the ionCube PHP Accelerator.

The Zend Performance Suite is far better, albeit commerical, though since it includes page (partial or whole page) and database query caching (in fact it can cache just about anything) to decrease the load in DB driven sites.

For all the PHP developers, the good ole Zend Studio is available on Mac OSX. If only NuSphere's PHPed was.

Hmm, what else keeps me a windows box next to my linux box. Perhaps it's DAOC, management of my Clie. The MS office support in OSX is tempting though!

With the upcoming major release (PHP 5) PHP will overcome its deficits when it comes to object-oriented language constructs. Have a look at this for a list of new features of the Zend Engine 2, the compiling and executing kernel of PHP 5. The Script Running Machine (SRM) completes PHP to an Application Server by providing a co-process to the web-server that runs persistent PHP objects.

I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned this.

Actually, using mod_php with Apache is an order of magnitude faster than mod_perl, particularly if you're using the Zend Performance Suite (nee' Zend Cache) -- it's a cached byte compilation system using shared memory for blazing speed.

We used it at my company and was able to reduce the number of servers used for the given load by 75%. Amazing stuff.

Why no official PHP Opcode cache [weblogs.com]? 30-200% performance gain

Simply asked, simply answered: there is no "official" PHP opcode caching because PHP relies on the Zend engine and the PHP developers work very closely with the people at Zend, who sell the Zend Performance Suite (formerly Zend Accelerator), and the guys at PHP are not about to cut into Zend's livelihood by bundling a product with PHP which makes the Zend product redundant.

I would wager to say that PHP doesn't come with an opcode cache because Zend would like to charge for theirs.

The command line interface enables you to run php scripts from the command line, that's all.

I'm totally unclear regarding your "point and click interface" dilemma. Are you talking about visual php editors?

Anyway, I agree that someone like you is probably better off with a "full-feature" language like ASP. Dig that full, elegant interface!

The command line interface enables you to run php scripts from the command line, that's all.

I'm totally unclear regarding your "point and click interface" dilemma. Are you talking about visual php editors?

Anyway, I agree that someone like you is probably better off with a "full-feature" language like ASP. Dig that full, elegant interface!

At www.zend.com/zend/week/week114.php

It says:

PHP 5 not yet scheduled The number of messages to the list requesting some sort of schedule or arrival date for PHP 5 seems to be steadily growing. Please note that there are yet no dates for anything to do with PHP 5, and there still may be a whole new PHP (4.4) before the road to 5 officially begins. If there are any announcements to be made you will find them on either the main PHP web site (www.php.net) , or they will be covered here in this summary (I promise!).

Summarizing about half the posts in this discussion, SuperDuG says:

Personally I don't see a need to switch to 2.0 yet. My site runs just fine on 1.x series.

Another large group (myself included) seems to be waiting until PHP et al are widely considered stable on the new platform, which in the case of PHP will occur sometime after the Zend site has a big fat endorsement on its front page.

The only reason I am looking at Apache 2.0 before that endorsement goes up is the Subversion project. This is a free software replacement for CVS which is getting relatively close to release and which will provide nice little features that CVS doesn't have like versioned moves and renames for files and directories. That one feature alone will make me very happy. The Subversion server requires Apache 2.0 for remote access, therefore 2.0 becomes more immediately interesting to me.

Wouldn't it be a little ironic if version control was what finally drove migration from the 1.3 series to 2.0?

One of the features I really miss in perl is a clean way to pre-compile
scripts. Both to speedup loading times and to byte-[en]code to program.

There is perlcc, which really isn't supported as a production tool and doesn't take
modules into account.

What do you think about technologies like Zend?

Is this really a issue for perl? or just a matter of time?

You could try OpenLDAP, but I haven't had very good luck with it in the past -- it's also overkill IMO. Oh yeah, and Entourage gets all sorts of flakey with non-MS LDAP servers.

Another option is to load up something like a PHP groupware solution... moregroupware is a really nice option, although German is the developers' first language ;)This'll give you webmail, shared (and private) calendars and address books.

What I'd do personally is just set up a quick mySQL database and PHP or Perl front-end that gives you clickable mailto: links for people's records. There's a million packages like this on Zend. I wrote one similar to record incoming callerID info and join to a vcard-like mysql table. Took an hour or two.

On the other hand, if you want to use Apple's address book, you could try to find where on the disk the data files are saved and do a root cron job to copy those files either between accounts or machines.

With Apple pushing Rendzevous and iCal as much as they are, I'm sure an Apple solution will pop up pretty quickly.

Best of luck.

[Leave it to MS to never miss an opportunity to turn a great concept on its head to leverage the rest of their product line:) The folks at MS who actually implemented the web access feature in Project must have had the breath knocked out of them at the "IE specialization".]

Nevertheless, the concept of web based project management is still a really good one. Not only for read-access to view what's going on, but also to help formulate project plans.

I prefer to spend my time programming, but have had brushes with project planning exercises and noted the dearth of good open source alternatives to MS Project (which, practically, seems to require some training in order to learn the quirks of how to use it.)

The most intriguing development I've seen is out of the Horde Project (a PHP framework for web applications).

They mention something called Nag that came out 1.0 on June 11 of this year, but I don't know what it's really like.

But I can see where having an XML database for projects that is accessed via PHP would be a good thing. That, and having some SVG enabled browsers (and server code) to create and view Gantt charts on the fly.

Since I'm throwing buzzwords and wishlists about, I may as well suggest that WebDAV would be a great part of such a tool because it would offer a good means for collaborative authoring of project plans, which is really how the best ones get done. (The worst ones are guesses and dictats that make everyone mad.)

PHP scripts are compiled in run-time. You can speed up PHP significantly by using a "Cache" module that stores precompiled php scripts (compiled ONLY the first time they are requested) in memory that is shared among requests. APC is a great one and is available at: http://apc.communityconnect.com/

Zend (http://zend.com) Also has a number of PHP goodies! Expect some significant speed improvements when using a cache! I highly recommend them!

x

Zend has some great articles on things you can do in PHP, including ways to get better security, graphics, site logins, etc. Check out the articles and tutorials sections.

1. SMB is integrated into Linux about as much as it is under Windows (the service is called smbd or server in each OS, turn it on, and go). We have multiple clients for network browsing and attaching to shares is handles as natively as NFS is. Server Appliance manufacturers simply don't have to do any Samba programming to make Samba function in an ordinary network - it works by default. Its also repeatedly benchmarked faster than the Windows implementation.
2. Linux can and is performing Active Directory in real world enterprise environments. Check out Quantum's Guardian 14000 NAS device, which runs a AD Enabled Samba to provide Linux native AD support for its 1.4TB of storage. Although the Samba code used contains beta code from Samba 3, but these aren't cheap boxes and the utmost of reliability is expected from them.
3. Scalability does not mean the ability to run on massively parallel x86 boxes. Windows 2000 runs on currently one platform. It does not scale to server class hardware beyond IA64. Linux does.
4. last time I saw a Specweb test, Tux on Linux trouced IIS on Win32, just like Samba on Linux trounced `Server' on Win32.
5. PHP is more popular than ASP Windows doesn't do PHP without addon software. The source is Netcraft, also quoted by Microsoft in their own benchmarks.
6. Again. Microsoft's definition of integrated is flawed. Its possible to build a modular OS where applications communicate with each other using standard protocols - you don't have to turn on everything by default.
7. Windows File Protection isn't necessary on Linux because Linux doesn't allow Joe User to save a trojan as C:\EXPLORER.EXE. Kudzu handles automatic configuration of hardware and requires less reboots to do so (test: configure a Linux / Windows XP dual boot on one system, pull out the hard disk, put it in another machine, time how long it takes for Kudzu /Windows Plug and Play to fix things)
8. NTFS is a semi journaling filesystem. Hence chkdisk takes a few minutes to recover the journal on NTFS 5.1, whereas Ext3 does it in a half second.
9. Red Hat does only have 2 official `certified' RAID for 7.3 drivers but according to the same HCL will support over thirt drives - whose vendors have not used Red Hat for testing, and thus are not `certified'. Likewise, there were only two certified apps for Windows 2000 professional when it was released (Omnipage and another app, IIRC).
10. Integration is why distributions exist. That is their function. Standards are handled by the Linux Standard Base.
11. The Web User Interface in Windows 2000 SAK is limited in out of the box functionality, requiring users to log directly into the device (rendering the device prone to significant danger through user tampering) to perform basic functions advertised in Win2000 SAK devices, like send alerts to an email address. As soon as users go out of your web based GUI (and they are required to) your server appliance is no longer an appliance - its a 2GB default install of Windows 2000 which users can and will modify (because the system encourages them to), increasing your support costs.
12. If you want to program an app for Linux, and don't wish to Open Source your application, simply write your own code. You don't even get this choice with Windows 200 SAK - you MUST write your own code.
13. That Microsoft would assume that the number of bug announcements for a product is indicative of that products security status illustrates a non existent understanding of basic security principles. All vulnerabilities are not reported, and bugs differ in severity and mitigation. According to ZDNet, Microsoft take a average of more than four times longer than Red Hat to patch a known flaw in their products, leaving MS customers exposed for longer periods of time. Furthermore Microsoft has a habit of not patching vulnerabilities at all - anyone who purchased Exchange 5.0 years ago (which had a known vulnerability allowing spammers to steal bandwidth from companies deploying the product) will know this - Microsoft never fixed the problem - customers had to PAY to upgrade to Exchange 5.5 to do this. As far as I know, the problem persists to this day (I'm not as involved in the Microsoft world as I used to be, having focused on Linux for the last three years).
14. Last time I saw, Kerberos 5 was supported in Red Hat Linux as a stanard option. Run setup, turn on Kerberos, enter the server details, done. Modern Linux does not authenticate in clear text, this is a falsehood. The MD5 algorithm used in Linux's shadow password file is stronger than the MD4 used in NTLM2 authentication, which has known flaws and is no longer recommended by those who originally created it. NTLM2 is necessary to authenticate Windows clients pre Windows 2000, such as NT4 and Windows 98, the most popular versions of Windows in existence.
15. Soon after Microsoft's alleged `security refocus' third parties found major vulnerabilities in Microsofts web server and browser platforms that were missed during the one month long `audit'
16. The GNU Public licensing model also does not contain licensing provisions that require an OEM, and potentially its licensees, to disclose the source code for its intellectual property in a widespread fashion to open source participants. To suggest otherwise is a fabrication. It does offer the option to use Open Source application code within an OEMs products. If this option is exercised, and the resultant application distributed, the company has obligations to also distribute source code of that application. This does not apply to Windows systems because Windows OEMs do not have this option. Linux OEMs may choose as they wish.

MySQL does offer support if you wish to pay for it. It even comes in two forms, standard and advanced.

PHP support is also available from Zend, and some is even included when you purchase one of their products.

It may not be one unified source, but if you're using Oracle software, you wouldn't expect MS to support it would you?

Did your company evaluate products such as the Zend Accelerator?

They seem to indicate it works well. Although our site's Case Study is a bit out-dated it still provides significant value, esp. when considering the cost of a J2EE app server and the like.

There is an article on php's output buffering (which includes compression)here
There are also a collection of third party class's which you can browse here.

As a designer and geek-by-trade, I'm going to have to side against the majority of Slashtypes here.

The importance weighting of design vs. content can vary by 180 degrees depending on the context of the site.

First off, if it's a shopping site, or "brochureware," design is 50 times more important than the content within. It's the difference between handing a customer a professionally designed brochure and a photocopy. The content on those sites is almost always brochure/catalog spooge.

Design isn't Flash, it isn't animated graphics... it's a polished, useful, easy to navigate user interface that doesn't suck or make them think. (Those are both fantastic books, BTW)

If you're building a community-based site, or an information-based site, then design falls (rightfully) into the back seat.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make is -- establish your priorities when designing the site. Is your primary userbase going to be the Slashcrowd? If so, you better make sure that the site is tolerable in Lynx -- and that crowd is much less likely to avoid a site just because it's ugly.

Joe Sixpack Consumer AOL User or Middle Management Stooge, on the other hand, will be less forgiving.

Bottom line -- if you're selling image or product, design matters a LOT. If you're selling community and ideas, design doesn't matter as much -- but try to make the site easy on the eyes.

And, please know that I'll personally hunt you down and kill you if you require IE5+, Win, or a plug-in to view over 50% of your site.

You've been warned!

On the Mac side (classic & OS X native), BBEdit is the pro's choice... it does context-sensitive coloring, etc and is the hands-down favorite for any kind of program coding on the Mac -- and it recognizes SQL syntax as well.

Adobe just announced that Golive 6 for OS X would have the Zend debugger engine integrated within it, as well

Dreamweaver Ultradev is another good choice, but at this point in time PHP isn't exactly integrated into it unless you use 3rd party extensions or an abstraction layer like ADODB.

--dr00gy

Other scripting languages have really hit a wall in development because of the objectless syntax, but ruby, is a piece of work.

Yeah, I can see your point. The other languages have a totally objectless syntax!

Too bad they have all hit a wall.

While this may or may not help (and if it does help, only for PHP developers) you might want to take a look at the Zend Encoder Unlimited. It is supposed to encode php scripts so that people can't just read them. Not sure if the server needs to configure anything or what have you, but it's worth a shot.

I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script or use a web editor.

First, read this slash about 4 Web Scripting Languages compared. It refers to a ZDNET article which benchmarked and came up with the following results:

PHP: 47pps
ASP: 43pps
CF: 29pps
JSP: 13pps
(pps = pages per second).

The JSP was done with Tomcat, which is apparently not the fastest implementation.

The real interesting thing is, the test was done before the advent of caching technology for PHP. Since then, the Zend Cache and the APC Cache have been released. Now, sit back for a second.

I played around with these babies. Generally, the APC cache doubled my pps, and the Zend Cache QUADRUPLED my pps. Other benchmarks posted on mailing lists showed comparable results. (Note that the tests were done on the same server with the same apps using ab - and of course the results weren't so good for particlulary db intensive pages). I am not shitting you about those results. The stuff flies as the cache stores the compiled object code and doesn't need to recompile on every pageview.

So, lets look at those results again and hypothetically extend them (just for shits and grins):

PHP+ZendCache: 198 pps
PHP+APC: 94 pps
PHP: 47pps
ASP: 43pps
CF: 29pps
JSP: 13pps

Not sure where mod_perl, C, or native servlets fit in there, but that's a pretty impressive showing by PHP.

g

There was an article here on slashdot that compared four different scripting languages. From the standpoint of speed PHP came in first. PHP has a reputation of being the fastest web scripting language and, to be honest, is a joy to program in as well. If this is not enough speed Zend sells a PHP cache that will precompile all your pages to speed things up even more. I believe there is a free version of the PHP cache out there but I don't know it by name.

And before you use MySQL please read this. MySQL has a reputation of being the fastest open source database but it really can't scale like Postgres can.

what i can suggest, from playing around with multiple languages (jsp, perl, python, php) on FreeBSD/apache, is to use php optimized with zend's optimizer.... the speed boost is about 15%, and if apache is configured correctly, or even patched for speed, php will outperform any other similarly prepared language.

--

1. In PHP it is possible to store more than one function per file. It is not possible to store more than one Cold Fusion "custom tag" per file.
2. In PHP you can access Oracle, MS-SQL, Postgres, and MySQL with equal ease. Cold Fusion is designed mainly to interface with MS-SQL.
3. PHP can be integrated into Apache or IIS, but it is also small enough to be launched as a script interpreter. Cold Fusion runs as a server-side process, and tends to bog down a Pentium-3 550 with 256 meg of ram.
4. PHP is free software; Cold Fusion is not.
5. PHP is available for a much wider variety of hardware and operating systems, and may be ported to others if it's worth your time. Cold Fusion is only available from Allaire; if they go under or don't want to develop for your system, you're out of luck.
6. PHP has had a slightly better track record of being upwardly compatible through version changes.

Sure.

www.php.net/manual. The manual is great. You can learn everything you need to know about specific things from there. Before that, you need a basic tutorial.

A PHP page looks like this:

<html>
<title>Hello</title>
<form action=<?php print $PHP_SELF; ?>
<input name=message>
<input type=submit>
</form>
<?php
print $message;
?>

Try that. Also, to get hold of PHP, use PHP Triad (on Linux, you can probably install it from your distribution CD), a win32 installer of PHP, Apache and MySQL.

Basically:

PHP is HTML with the code embedded between blocks starting
<?php

and ending
?>

within that you put your PHP code.

For example:

<?php
print "hello";
?>
would display hello - just like perl.

Similarly, as in Perl, variables are preceded by $.

So:

<?php
$message="chese";
print "I like $message";
?>

It's convenient - all form variables get put into variables of the same name:

<form action=apage.php>
<input name=thing>
<input type=submit name=action value=Submit>
</form>

would send apage.php two variables - $action='Submit'; and $thing= whatever you typed in there.

You should investigate PHP's object-orientation functions too. Here's an example class [class omitted due to slashdot's lameness filter :-(], which should be pretty explanatory.

Anyway, start here; read here for more, as well as here. Also subscribe to the mailing list at php-general@lists.php.net for help from others.
--

Or you could use this php Image To HTML Text Converter by Markus Dobel.

echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13

pgadmin - 32bit app for win*

phpPgAdminweb interface admin. This is a port of phpMyAdmin for MySQL (which I believe can be found at zend.com)

While the case study chapter may not be interesting to most, the last chapter on extending the Zend engine should be a must read for anyone wanting to add their own functions.
It has the blessing of the Zend team as 'the' resource for extending Zend and that chapter is also published under the Open Content License meaning it can be distributed outside of the book just like any other piece of open source software. Observant readers will note the inclusion of the open source license at the rear of the book.

As for PHP resources, as someone pointed out, the PHP documentation is pretty damn fine and is available via CVS as sometimes the web version lags behind.
PHPBuilder.com, Zend.com, FAQTS and Weberdev amongst others all have plenty of applications, tips and tutorials.

Graeme

• PHP - This is the site that started it all. Make sure to check out the documentation section.
• Webmonkey PHP Tutorial - This site is great for getting started with PHP and MySQL.
• PHP Builder - My favorite site about PHP. Lots of good examples and a great message board for all your programming needs!
• Zend - This site is a great portal for more PHP resources.

Hope these sites help out.