PHPDeveloper.org http://www.phpdeveloper.org Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and community en-us Sat, 25 May 2013 06:16:43 -0500 30 <![CDATA[Vance Lucas' Blog: Practical Uses for PHP 5.3 Closures]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15306 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15306 By now everyone's heard about one of the more powerful and major advancements made in the PHP 5.3.x series of the language - closures. You might have read a description of them and been left wondering what a practical application might be to help drive the point home. Vance Lucas has written up a post to help with just that.

If you're like me, you might be wondering what the practical uses for these new features are before you can rightly justify diving in and using them in new or existing projects. I experimented a lot with closures and possible uses over the past few weeks, and came up with some compelling reasons to start using them.

He's come up with five different examples of how you can use this handy feature:

  • Templating
  • Dynamic Code Extension
  • Delayed Execution
  • Caching
  • Convenience (as in their role in one-off functions for callbacks)

Each of the tips comes with a bit of code (except delayed execution, that's a bit more involved) to help explain the point a bit more.

]]> Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:51:47 -0500 <![CDATA[Derick Rethans' Blog: Collecting Garbage: Performance Considerations]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15117 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15117 Derick Rethans has posted the third part of his series looking at the garbage collection handling in PHP (the first two parts are here: one, two). In this last part of the series, he'll look at some of the possible performance impacts the garbage collection functionality can have in your applications.

In the previous two parts of this column we have explored PHP's take on circular referenced variables and a mechanism that allows to clean up this particular problem with reference counted variable tracking. Of course, the implementation of the garbage collection mechanism in PHP 5.3 has some performance impacts. In this third and last part of the column I will cover the performance implications of the addition of this garbage collection mechanism.

He looks at the two possible places that the collection could have an impact - memory usage and run-time delays when the garbage collection routine is fired off and does its job. As before, each of the topics is accompanied by bits of code and a few graphs showing the differences between handling in PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 as well as a handy way to get a bit more information out of PHP (using the GC_BENCH CFLAG when compiling). ,/p>]]> Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:22:42 -0500 <![CDATA[Lukas Smith's Blog: PHP 5.3.0 stable almost released :)]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12754 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12754 As Lukas Smith mentions in his latest post to his blog, the release of PHP 5.3 that was originally slated for today has been put off just a bit longer.

It almost happened, but it didn't for now. Originally we planned to release today. But again a few issues came up, even with Johannes deciding that sleep is for the weak, it just seemed unwise to announce the release today. So we pushed things back a few days, so the new date is June 30th (meaning it will be a Tuesday release).

We'll announce this as soon as its posted as stable to the PHP.net website, so keep an eye out on Tuesday for this greatly anticipated release!

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