You've checked and double checked the integrity of user input, and you're doing some serious processing. There's only one problem: it's too slow. There's a simple solution: forking your processing script, and running the code as a background process asynchronously. It can email your user when it's done: they'll wait. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get started with background processes in PHP.

Akash gives examples of the three keys to background processes - starting the script via an exec, talking to the process by passing additional parameters and including code to monitor the state of the background process via something like a MySQL "sessions" table that the script writes to.

One point of flexibility [Zend_Form] offers has proved to be a pain point for many developers: decorators. This tutorial aims to shed some light on decorators, as well as provide strategies for creating your own decorators and combining them in creative ways to customize the output your forms generate.

Matthew starts with a little background behind the component to help you find your way around. Building on this, he shows how to use some standard output decorators and how to create decorators of your own. His example shows how to create a set of grouped checkboxes.

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

I have updated my Easy Reflections code and released v2. Thanks to feedback and some code from Monte Ohrt (co-developer of Smarty) he added in cache support and fixed a banding issue with the alpha levels. It all works really nicely now - and the new version, with the new docs are available at http://reflection.corephp.co.uk.

The script takes any image (jpeg/png) and makes a reflection for it (he gives the album cover reflection in Apple's iTunes as an example). Configuration of the reflection is available including intensity, background, and height. Check out the galleries on motortopia.com for an example of it in action.