Welcome to the first edition of the PHP performance series, a new series that I will be explaining ways to gain efficiencies and squeezing more performance out of your applications. This first edition, caching techniques, focuses on ways to cache data to optimize your current sites. Some of the concepts here are fairly easy to implement while others may take strategic design in the architecture of your application.

The methods he looks at this time are:

• Opcode Caching
• File Priming
• Caching Variables
• File Caching
• Memory Caching
• Database Memory Tables
• RAM Disk

This tutorial will attempt to cover some advanced techniques of pagination. In large this will cover Ajax pagination. Hopefully we can also uncover some of the better practices and techniques to use with pagination.

They look at four different topics:

• Ajax Pagination
• Searching (use of pagination on the results page)
• Other Techniques
• some of the Known Weaknesses the method has

Code is included.

They start off looking at the DSNs mentioned previously and include a bit of error checking around it to handle anything that might come up. The next step is, of course, to make a query against the information in your database. They also include an example of the fetchRow method to push the returned results into a variable.

The variable is built out as an array, so they show what that array looks like "on the inside" and how you can reference the different values that make it up.

For each of the three topics covered, they include a few code examples on their use - an HTML form with the filter extension, user authentication with the PEAR Auth, and encrypting data to be used in a more secure cookie.

The article is excerpted from PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide by Larry Ullman.

This chapter will begin by rehashing the fundamentals of secure PHP programming. These are the basic things that I hope/assume you're already doing. After that a quick example shows ways to validate different kinds of data that might come from an HTML form.

The third topic is the new-to-PHP 5 PECL library called Filter. Its usage isn't very programmer-friendly, but the way it wraps all of the customary data filtering and sanitizing methods into one interface makes it worth knowing. After that, two different uses of the PEAR Auth package show an alternative way to implement authorization in your Web applications. The chapter will conclude with coverage of the MCrypt library, demonstrating how to encrypt and decrypt data.

The security tips in this part of the series range from turning off register_globals (you do have it off, don't you?) to form validation with things like regular expressions and the ctype functions.

This article will illustrate some basic techniques for using the mysqli interface. This is a great tool to use in php5 because it doesn't need any include libraries like PEAR, etc; it is compiled right into the distribution.

They start things simple, showing how to make the mysqli connection in your script, including how to set up the connection parameters. They move quickly into making queries on the database - first a simple one with a loop and then a more complex example with a prepared query. They wrap things up by helping you create a simple class that works as a bit of an abstraction layer to query and report on the results returned.

Here are some bugfixing rules and tips I've learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. I've moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.

Topics covered include:

• Assume nothing
• Turn Error Reporting to show all errors
• Read the error message
• Understand the bug
• "Scooby-Bug, where are you?"
• Get as much information as possible

I'm currenlty working on a site where I want to improve performance of dynamic pages. One of the greatest techniques to do is to cache dynamic content and serve the generated output (HTML). It's not as easy as we all want it to be when you have all sorts of weird blocks on the page: User login area, random content, ..etc

As I had a very pleasent experience with eZ components last week, I decided to take a look at the components, but then i remembered it works on PHP5. This project is on PHP4, I had to look for an alternative and decided to use PEAR::Cache_Lite.

He gives a visual example of what he's working towards and includes some sample code (using Cache_Lite) to create the blocks of content for his site. It took a few tries to get right, but apparently, third time's the charm.

Ok, I shouldn't use such a buzz-headline, but I was very happy today, when I discovered a new way to bootsrap CakePHP wihout having to render a page. This is especially useful when you try to embed CakePHP in existing php apps (drupal, wordpress, ..., ?), or when you try to write unit tests for highly coupled classes such as Controllers or Models.

Basically, the technique involves tricking the Dispatcher into not rendering based on the $_GET values by making it think that it's being asked for the favicon.ico file.