Application level SQL performance is much different than the performance of the SQL query itself but rather how it has been designed to work in the application. Many of the items I will be addressing in this area is designing your application to make less queries thus improving scalability and likely performance. However, performance does not always equal scalability as the same with scalability does not always equal performance.

He looks at a few different topics like lazy connections, iterating queries, need-based selects, normalization and a few simple things that you can apply to every SQL your application uses to optimize it as much as possible.

Here's the list of the parts of the series:

• Part 1 - introduction, sample usage
• Part 2 - problems in making an event-based ajax callback model (and his solutions)
• Part 3 - the use of JSON in the framework
• Part 4 - implementation of the Scriptifiable interface
• Part 5 - implementing the Remotable interface

You can download the latest version of his Ajax framework directly from his blog.

What's the best way to learn a new skill like PHP programming? By spending days reading a boring technical book? Or perhaps sifting through hundreds of small web tutorials - some outdated, or even just wrong. Of course not! The best way to learn is by watching someone who really knows what they're doing, and then following their example!

Unfortunately, the videos aren't free, but they're only about $50 CDN and cover all of the topics you'll need to get started with PHP:

• Programming for the Web
• Arrays
• Loops
• Functions
• and how to tie it all together.

You can find out more about the videos on their site as well as place your order

This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security updates include prevention of a buffer overflow in FastCGI mode, an integer overflow in printf, correction for a safe_mode bypass method in cURL and the bundling of PCRE 7.6 to update the regular expression functionality of the language.

You can grab this latest release from the downloads page on PHP.net (or your favorite mirror) - both the source and the Windows binaries.

In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Here's the list so far:

• Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
• Part 2 - splitting it up to make the layout parts
• Part 3 - converting the Photoshop template to XHTML
• Part 4 - cleaning up the XHTML and doing some styling with CSS
• Part 5 - how to preload some images with Javascript to make the page load faster
• Part 6 - creating the WordPress-specific markup
• Part 7 - working up the PHP functionality
• Part 8 - integrating PHP into the template
• Part 9 - marking up the "framework" of the site (header/footer/sidebar)
• Part 10 - adding additional files like a links page and changing the posting template
• Part 11 (?) - deploying the theme out to the public view

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library. The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

They start from the ground up - making the database tables, inserting some data - before writing up the simple PHP class with methods like deleteFromCart and getCart. This lays the foundation for the next article in the series where they add in a splash of ajax to make it a bit more user-friendly.

In the good old days, if you wanted to create re-usable code, you would create a library of related functions or objects. Now, the excitement is all around frameworks. Everyone has one. What is the difference between the two?

He compares a library and a framework, pointing out key differences like how they fit with the application (controlled by or controlling) and dependencies they require. He rounds out his boot sequence, adding a few new parts to the structure of his example application.

Starting any new application is like walking into a shop and being dazzled by the displays. You want everything but finally realise you only have so much resources to spend. So you isolate the specifics you must have, and focus on those.

This first part focuses on the planning stages of the application. He works through the features he wants the blog to have and some of the external libraries he's going to rely on (things like PHPUnit and jQuery). His goal for the series and the application is to have something he can replace his current blog with and to provide readers a step by step detail of the progress along the way.

Today we are going to talk to Wil Sinclair and Brad Cottel. Wil is the manager of the Advanced Technologies Group at Zend. We will be talking about the newly released Zend Framework 1.5.

You can grab this episode in one of three easy ways either: grabbing the mp3, listening to it via the in page player or the "lazy man's option" - scribe to their feed and get this and other great/future episodes brought directly to your aggregator.

In Part 1 of a three-part series on creating an on-demand video site with PHP, we begin by looking at the different flavors of digital video and their particular nuances. When creating video for the Web, the overarching issue you need to keep in mind is whether you want your video to be small and easy to download or whether you want it to be the best quality possible.

They'll also show you how to convert the video into the Flash Video format to make it easy to pull into an in-page Flash player. You'll need to register or log in to get to the article.