In your controller before you load a view, CodeIgniter will give you information regarding how fast the page loaded, how many SQL queries executed, the content of each query, and the running time of each query. This is incredibly useful when you are trying to debug your application, or simply see how quickly things are loading. There's only one problem: To enable profiling, that line of code above must be present. What if you want to profile several pages, or even your whole web application?

He turned to another built-in feature of the framework, the controller hooks it allows, to set up a simple post-controller execution that gets a new CodeIgniter instance and enables the profiling configuration item. This is a much better option than having to put the line in each and every controller and method he might want profiled.

Over the years, PHP has evolved from a script language to a programming language used in big applications with high-level architectures. As the most popular language for web applications, PHP is very fast, robust and stable by default. Coming from tiny scripts, PHP is used in large-scale web applications nowadays. In terms of business context, we need to focus on these three key factors: Scalability, Responsiveness and Resource misusage. All three factors have a high impact on hardware costs, customer loyalty and - indirectly - sales.

They mention a few ways that you can use to optimize your application's code including evaluating resource limitations, Firebug caching results and finding bottlenecks with something like XDebug.

Topics mentioned include:

• PHPCity
• Thoughts on PHP as the next Java
• The Google Charting API
• Profiling PHP applications

To grab this latest show you can either subscribe to their feed or you can just get the latest show via a direct mp3 download.

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

After PHP 5.3 was branched (for making place for - among other new stuff - namespaces), it was finally time to put my XSLT profiling addition into the official PHP sources.

The addition allows you to check in on your XSLT translations and see which spots in it are taking the most time to parse. This can be a very valuable tool when trying to see into the "black box" that PHP has around XSLT transformations. PHP 5.2ers can get the same functionality with this patch too.

Other great articles in this issue include:

• a look at Flex and the Zend Framework
• part one of a series on normalization (Chinese)
• using cURL to extract pages and their data
• "The Job Interview" - an insiders guide.

There's two ways to get this issue - you can either subscribe to the magazine for a year (the PDF edition is only $40 USD) or you can buy the single issue for about $5 USD.

Several of the comments either ask why he would want to write it when the two tools he mentions work just fine or a few links to scripts out there that already do this sort of thing. If you've been looking for something like this, definitely check out this post - there's a few resources in there you don't want to miss.