The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup » php

PHP usage statistics

dave — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:21:37 +0000

Andrew Nacin from WordPress provided these interesting statistics on what PHP versions are serving up WordPress sites around the world:

4.3 – 1.3%
4.4 – 6.3%
5.0 – 0.1%
5.1 – 3.5%
5.2 – 85.4%
5.3 – 3.4%

Getting started with OOP & PHP5

dave — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:45:09 +0000

The fine folks at Think Vitamin/Carsonified posted an introduction to object oriented programming that I though some of you might enjoy.

PHP 6 gets a do-over

dave — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:28:43 +0000

Remember PHP 6? If you’ve been following PHP development, it’s been hard to miss the next big iteration looming over our heads. Some of the exciting new features of PHP 5.3 were back-ported from PHP 6, making it an impressive “minor version” upgrade. I always found PHP 6 interesting for two reasons. First, safe_mode (more appropriately called kill-your-server-with-tons-of-security-checks_mode) was being removed completely. Second, PHP was being rewritten with Unicode support throughout.

Unfortunately, Unicode support was turning out to be a pain, and development “stalled”. Yesterday, Rasmus Lerdorf announced a do-over for PHP 6 using new approaches to implementing Unicode. In addition, PHP 6 will be developed alongside PHP 5.4, so it’ll be less of a hassle to share features between them.

Though this may sound like a step backward, I see it as a big step towards a working PHP 6 release and an opportunity to make PHP 5.4 more of a stepping stone on the way to the next major version.

PHP 5.3.1 released

dave — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:55:49 +0000

DevTheWeb has a summary of the changes in this release.

For full details, see the official changelog.

The skinny of PHP accelerators

dave — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:56:24 +0000

A great discussion from Reddit: Can anyone give me the skinny on PHP accelerators?

Zend discounts (training, Zend Studio) + free php|architect issue

dave — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:35:41 +0000

I don’t know if it’s just the economy, but I’ve started clipping
coupons again. In fact, my wife gave me an early birthday present: a
coupon organizer to carry in my laptop bag. So, I guess it’s no
surprise that I’ve actually started paying attention to the discounts
different PHP related vendors are offering, and thought I’d share some
of the latest with the group in case you’re looking to save a few
bucks.

Zend is offering $100 off Zend Studio if you take their survey by May
31st. That brings the price down to $299, which isn’t too bad for a
feature-rich IDE & debugger. Details are on their web site,
http://www.zend.com

Also, if you’re interested in online PHP training, head over to
http://www.zend.com/en/store/php-training and use the code training12
by June 31st for 12% off.

The folks at php|architect magazine are giving away downloads of the
May issue. They gave us copies of this at php|tek, and it’s mainly
focused on running PHP on Windows (Microsoft was a sponsor), but
there’s some nuggets in there for everyone else. Take a look — it’s
free, what do you have to lose? Download your copy at
http://phparch.com/c/magazine/issue/97

Remember our next meeting is June 4th at 7pm, and Mike Creuzer is
going to wow us by de-mystifying Bayesian filtering. See how spam
email & comments get filtered out so effectively these days. Don’t
forget to visit http://php.meetup.com/381/ and RSVP!

One Minute With PHP6

dave — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:00:52 +0000

PHP6, the next major version of the popular language, has been “coming soon” for a while now. But, in case you want to be prepared when the big day finally comes, here are some tips for making sure your PHP5 code will run under PHP6.

PHP Advent

dave — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:17:20 +0000

I wish I had known about this sooner, as it’s almost Christmas (you did finish your shopping, right?). OmniTI, a New York web development consultancy, is publishing their annual PHP Advent blog. Today’s article, Yet, echoes a lot of my feelings toward PHP these days.

If there were a product statement for PHP, it’d probably be something like “only a drunken Martian could come up with this.” [. . .] I, myself, have been known to go through episodes of periodical rejection, during which I can’t stand a particular feature of PHP (and, often, of other products, but that’s a different story), but I haven’t given up on PHP—yet.

I also enjoyed Coping with the Holiday Shopping Spree, an article on enhancing client-side site loading performance.