Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it's episode 11 when it's actually episode 12, but hey!

They talk about the Apple vs. Android functionality gap, Rackspace's recent issues and the definition of "guiding principles in an open source project". They also mention another PHP community member Brian Deshong who has volunteered to help out with an iPad app for the show.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed (or on iTunes).

In my previous post Modern framework comparison I presented performance tests, which compared Ruby On Rails, Django and Symfony2. After recieving a feedback in comments I decided to run this benchmark one more time on my own laptop (instead of on my hosting). The reason was simple: enviroment was outdated.

There were some overall performance increases were seen, but some statistics were higher - the "time per request" for all of them grew, some by quite a bit. He presents these benchmarks with a caveat, though:

You should never choose framework based on benchmarks. Those shows them from one point of view, but there are plenty of other aspects, such as support, community, maturity, number of ready to use components.

Just as the Japanese, Spanish and French languages are uniquely different, programming languages also have their variations, some more popular and easier to use than others. With the recent introduction of some new ones, there is a 'war' of modern day languages. What's easier and faster to use is not always the best option.

The graphic includes stats like:

• Usability ratings
• Popularity in the TIOBE index
• How much it's discussed (from the IEEE Spectrum, IRC)
• The number of open job postings
• Average run time/lines of code

Check out the full post for more interesting data.

A few weeks ago, while attending the delightful OggCamp, I was approached by someone asking me to speak at PyConUK. Well ... I'm a PHP developer, but as with most PHP developers, we just like good shiny tech and aren't religious about any particular language. So I instantly said yes and then started to worry what I was letting myself in for!

She mentions being happy for attending if for nothing else than that it allowed her a look at technology outside of the usual PHP bubble. The event featured session on topics ranging from music production on linux, the Nanode project, accessibility and Lorna's "Careers in Open Source" presentation.

Attending conferences/events that apply outside of your own community can lead to some great things. Be sure to poke your head up now and again and take in the bigger picture - there's more than just one language (or sets of technology) out there. Jump in and learn from them, even if you're just a beginner.

PHP is notorious among scripting languages for it's verbose syntax - you have to spell out many things that are much shorter in other languages. Some people think it's very bad that they can't be "expressive", meaning writing more clever code with less keystrokes. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are not.

He talks about the upcoming syntax change in PHP 5.4 for defining arrays (being able to use square brackets) and how it makes sense based on the standards of other languages using a similar syntax. He gives one bad example from Python, though - how Python 2 handled the catching of exceptions and assigning the result.

Some people in PHP community think all "shortcuts" are best to be avoided. I think some of them could be useful, provided clarity is not sacrificed and there's not "too much magic".

Even after just one week using Python, I remember why I'll always prefer it - it empowers me as a programmer. In the Python community, they refer to it as the "batteries included" philosophy - with the mere inclusion of a library, anything becomes possible. Combine that with clean and readable syntax, fluent interfaces, powerful list comprehensions, list slicing, an interactive console, and too many other features to mention, it's clear to see why.

He illustrates one of the differences between the two languages in the handling of things as objects versus strings. He recommends developers at least take a look at Python as an alternative to some of the usual PHP you might be used to.

The developers at Facebook have brought PHP developers a powerful REPL now ala-Python to round out a solid toolbox that PHP developers already have. The project is called phpsh and is written in Python.

He includes the commands you'll need to get it pulled from github and working, providing you with an interactive shell right on your local machine (more powerful than the built-in PHP shell). You can also grab a zip or gzipped archive for download. For complete details on the tool and how to use it, see phpsh.org.

Today i decided to install Python in Ubuntu OS and to use PHP and Python both together. If i hadn't installed php and wanted to have python as only localhost in my OS, so it was easy, there are plenty of examples which show how to do it(for example). But if you have already installed php and you want to have python, then let's go on. Of course we need two different ports if we want to do so. And i could easily install and test it. So i am sharing how i did it.

He includes all of the commands and configuration changes you'll need to get Python and Apache all set up (he assumes you already have PHP installed). He also includes a full listing of his Apache config file so you can get a feel of how it all fits together using the VirtualHosts.

I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind the scenes by reading on the index definition to see if I could understand what happened. After reading through the definition I still don't know what happened, or even why it happened.

He goes through how the index data is created - search results from the top 6 hits in Alexa for each language result - and how he, basically, found nothing out of the ordinary. He points out that, because of inconsistencies like this, the TIOBE index shouldn't be regarded as much more than a loose guide. Since it's based on hard-coded search strings, it'll never be a true judge of "popularity" overall.

More and more users are turning away from Google Analytics (GA) as a provider of web measurement solutions on security, independence and functionality grounds. One problem they run into is that after years of using Google's product they have a considerable inventory of data about their websites stuck with GA, which makes starting over with an alternative provider something of a hassle. [...] Effectively, thanks to Google2Piwik, nothing is stopping you from moving away from Google Analytics to a safer, more robust and more functional alternative.

The tool is written in Python, so you'll need to have that and both access to the Google API and have a Piwik install set up (it's PHP/MySQL based) to make the translation. There's a few limitations to the import, though, so be sure to check out the tool's project page for those. Piwik is an open source project that provides real-time web analytics that installs on your own server and gathers data via a Javascript tag embedded in your site.