So, what does this mean for the CodeIgniter community? In short, absolutely nothing. Most CodeIgniter developers are building applications that will run on shared hosts, virtual private servers or a cloud-based virtualization system. Of that very large group of our community, an extremely small number have the capability to compile the HipHop binaries or alter their configuration in order to serve HipHop pages.

He points out that, for most developers and applications, time is better spent optimizing the actual application - things like reducing the I/O needs, caching, etc. HipHop, unless you have a very high demand and load on the application, won't give much of a gain. He gives the example of Facebook's load and how even it would only relatively recently would benefit from the tool.

Some recent attention in the PHP framework community has been focused on the recent publication of Symfony 2 Preview benchmarks showing that Symfony 2 outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 3.5. It also outperforms every other benchmarked framework. [...] My fellow Zend Frameworkers, we cannot allow this to stand. [...] I have created the benchmark of benchmarks. Well, to be honest, I only really edited another benchmark. But still, it will prove Zend Framework is faster than everything else out there.

His benchmarks are a little different from the rest with both the usual comparisons between the framework request numbers and a bit of explanation on how the Zend Framework came out on top - he cheated. What it really boiled down to was how the code that was tested was written. His code was optimized in a few different ways (All-in vs the Optimized/More-Optimized/What-The-Fuck-Optimized) and he includes custom benchmarks to show how they differ. What it really boils down to from his perspective is simply put:

Benchmarks. Useless. Final words? Know your framework! All this benchmarking nonsense does little good unless it's plastered with disclaimers.

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framework responsiveness.

Paul points out that Fabien's reporting is a bit inaccurate and goes on to talk about how his numbers are off and what a more correct version of the benchmarks would look like. He takes the testing methodology that Fabien used in his process and reapplies it to his benchmarking process using clean Amazon EC2 instances and Siege to run some response/request testing on software running on each framework. Numbers are run for three different comparisons and results are found...but you'll have to read the rest of the post to find those out.

The past week was the week of Symfony Live 2010 in Paris. One of the people there was Nils Adermann, the new Lead Developer of the phpBB project. The biggest news was that phpBB is considering moving to Symfony 2 as the basis of their new version of phpBB: phpBB4.

There's an RFC posted for anyone that would like to reply back to the idea. In Stefan's response he mentions things that would be positive about the decision like not having to reinvent the wheel, getting the support of the pre-established Symfony community, making it easier to extend phpBB via Symfony code and a certain sense of security that comes with having the framework backing.

To be honest, I was a little worried about the conference -- many see Symfony and ZF as being in competition, and that there would be no cross-pollination. I'm hoping that between Fabien, Stefan, and myself, we helped dispel that myth this week. The fact of the matter is that no single project can be fully comprehensive, and do everything perfectly.

He talks a bit more about the real difference between most of the MVC frameworks out there (tooling and communities) and each framework's development goals. Matthew's goal was to show Symfony developers that it's not just about staying within the ecosystem of your selected framework when developing - you need to branch out and find the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's found in the Zend Framework, other times it's elsewhere.

This blog inspired me to make an event calendar using CodeIgniter. You can download Bari's source files. Please unzip it and save them. We are going to use them later. Bari puts a demo here. We are going to add this to CodeIgniter. I continue using BackendPro for this purpose.

Using the BakcendPro as a base, they create everything else to wrap around it: some CSS and Javascript, a database table to store the events, and the PHP code - the controller, model and views for general viewing, editing and creating a new calendar. Full code is provided for all both in cut&pasteable code blocks and in a downloadable file.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

Symfony is an open-source PHP web framework that provides architecture, components and tools for developers to build and maintain complex web applications faster. The Symfony framework uses the MVC architecture to make the web applications a lot easier and faster to modify.

They walk through a brief look at the MVC pattern before getting into how Symfony can automatically create a base project (using the command line "symfony" tool), how to configure your Apache server and how to get a database up and working with some sample data. The code for their sample site is available for download.

Over the course of your web development experience, what PHP framework(s) have you worked with? What strengths and weaknesses have you observed in those frameworks? Considering these, what framework would you recommend if beginning a new application?

Fans and developers from most of the popular PHP framework have contributed their two cents into the discussion including links to other resources showing "versus" comparisons and even a mention or two of Ruby on Rails.

Some of the updates include:

• That Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as a Community Chieftain
• Rick Ellis is on twitter now
• A long list of bugs and updates to the CodeIgniter source

And, of course, he (sort of) answers the constant question he and his fellow developers get - when will CodeIgniter 2 be released and what will be in it?