You've checked and double checked the integrity of user input, and you're doing some serious processing. There's only one problem: it's too slow. There's a simple solution: forking your processing script, and running the code as a background process asynchronously. It can email your user when it's done: they'll wait. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get started with background processes in PHP.

Akash gives examples of the three keys to background processes - starting the script via an exec, talking to the process by passing additional parameters and including code to monitor the state of the background process via something like a MySQL "sessions" table that the script writes to.

In this third part of the series, I'm going to show you how to retrieve some useful information about a specific object, including its properties and methods, prior to its being destroyed by the PHP parser via the implementation of a simple destructor.

Their new user class extracts the details about each of the objects right before they're destroyed via a call to get_object_vars and a loop to display the property and its value.

The PHP-GTK.eu community site is now host to an IRC bot named Gataka (for "GTK"), helping users on the Freenode IRC channel for PHP-GTK, at irc://irc.freenode.net/php-gtk.

Currently is has an API interface (for PHP-GTK elements), user tracking and the ability to learn factoids. They're even starting to look for input regarding new features (log publication, in this case).

OK, today's release party wins. I've just uploaded the 8th package for release, and it's a very significant day of releases.

The three updates made today are:

• An update to the PEAR website that allows for patch tracking in the bug tracker
• The latest version of PHP_ParserGenerator - version 0.1.5
• and the release of the first, full-featured parser for PHP - PHP_Parser along with a "companion", PHP_Parser_DocblockParser

These features aren't competing for the heavy weight title in the release notes. Still, having these implemented in PHP makes it a lot easier to develop modern, more responsive, web based applications.

You can get more info on the JSON extension here and an example of the file upload monitor in this entry on the Bitflux blog.

We finally managed to get the program online for the professional PHP track at the Free and Open Source Conference 2006, which takes place on the next weekend (June 24th and 25th) in Bonn, Germany. We will have 6 PHP related talks on Saturday, held by professional PHP developers, and a hackaton event on Sunday. Everyone is invited to join us and have a good time.

He lists the selected talks as well, including "Using Geeklog as a Web Application Framework", "SVG and AJAX", and "XMLReader/Writer".

Since this bug has just broken today, there's no response from phpBB as of yet with a patch, but expect it soon if this issue is as important as the post mentions.