I find it interesting and challenging to bend PHP in ways it probably shouldn’t be bent. Almost always I walk away pleasantly surprised at it’s ability to solve a variety of problems.
Consider this example. Let’s say you want to take advantage of more than one core for a given process. Perhaps it [...]

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I finally got around to setting up a more sophisticated deployment system for some of my apps. These apps include some built on a custom PHP framework and others that are Python / Django apps. I figured I’d share my experience…
Why is a high-level deployment infrastructure important? Deployment is something that should [...]

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Send this to your significant other/parent/relative/friend so, instead of that sweater, you get one of these nuggets of awesome this Christmas.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Write better, cleaner, more maintainable code. Learn how to manage your projects and focus on shipping your product. With insight that covers the gamut of software development [...]

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The Problem
I’m sure many have used PHP’s default session handling capabilities. By default, PHP uses the filesystem to store session data naming files with their session id # and putting them in /tmp.
This is done for the sake of simplicity. On a single-server, low load website, this particular setup works fine. It’s [...]

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Motivation: For a side project I am working on, I wanted to be able to send a trackback to WordPress blogs (or any blog with an XMLRPC endpoint), using PHP.   Simple enough.
Methodology: I had a few different options.  I could have manually made a POST request to the endpoint, hand-coding the XML (this brute force [...]

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Pretty major day in the world of the web, eh?
The PHP development team announced the release of version 5.3.0. This is a major milestone. Here’s what I’m most excited about:

Lambda Functions and Closures
ternary short cut “?:”
Optional garbage collection for cyclic references

I’m excited about support for namespaces, but not the particular syntactical implementation chosen.
Also, [...]

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I like Python. I like Ruby. I like C, C++, and Objective-C. I like Java. I also (actually) like PHP. I like programming – get it? Use whatever gets the job done and done well. Use whatever achieves the performance and scalability you require for a given task. [...]

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This post got me thinking about exactly why it is that PHP developers dislike Java?
While researching I stumbled upon this post which attempts to explain why you shouldn’t treat PHP as if it were Java. The example singleton code looks nearly identical in both PHP and Java. The author suggests that an “experienced” [...]

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Found some great PHP resources that I’d like to share. I haven’t seen much talk of these so I’m hoping I can help spread the word.
First off libmemcached.
Most PHP folks are familiar with the memcache (note the lack of a ‘d’ in the name) PECL extension. This extension exposes a simple [...]

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Background
“Long polling” is the name used to describe a technique which:

An AJAX request is made (utilizing a javascript framework such as jQuery)
The server waits for the data requested to be available, loops, and sleeps (your server-side PHP script)
This loop repeats after data is returned to the client and processed (usually in your AJAX request’s onComplete [...]

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