PHPDeveloper.org

The Show (CakePHP Podcast): Understanding FormHelper

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:09:00 -0500

The CakePHP podcast, "The Show" has posted it's latest episode - a spotlight on the FormHelper component of the framework:

Nate Abele and Larry Masters join me to discuss the new FormHelper feature in CakePHP 1.2. This time we manage to stay on topic and sober. Join us for an archived hour of form developing goodness.

You can either subscribe to their normal feed, their iTunes feed or you can just grab the show directly from the site to enjoy the episode.

The Codist Blog: Followup To: I Will Never Understand the Appeal Of PHP

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 07:11:32 -0600

A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.

Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.

He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.

Tectonic.co.za: Getting your head around PHP objects

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:02:20 -0500

In a new article from Tectonic today, Jason Norwood-Young takes a look at one of the harder things for beginning PHP developers to understand - objects.

Still the practice of using objects in PHP remains a bit of a lost art - you're more likely to find an application with a bunch of functions than objects. PHP just lends itself to function-like thinking.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take advantage of the object-oriented (OO) features of PHP. The big question is when. Deciding when to implement a bit of code as an object or as a function is the real trick of object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP (or as I like to call it, POOP). If you get that right, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle down the line.

Jason starts off with the differences between OOP and regular, procedural programming, explaining it with a series of reasons/times to choose OOP. Of course, code examples are a must, and a few are included, showing the structure of classes and how to create new objects from them. He explains the PHP5 functionality offered as well, including private/public/protected values and functions.

Drupal.org: Tuning your server for optimal Drupal performance

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 07:14:14 -0500

On the Drupal site, there's a handy article instructing you on getting the most performance out of your server for the Drupal software.

The performance of your Drupal site is dependent on three main factors: the goals of your site, the resource demands of your site traffic, and the system performance and configuration of underlying technologies.

They seperate it out into three different sections - setting out your performance goals, analysing your site for current traffic/resource consumption, and the actual implementation of the performance settings. They give a few steps here to follow to check what your server is currently using and some links to other tips on tuning the various pieces of the puzzle.

One thing that they mention that's worth repeating to any and all web developers out there: "Apache is bandwidth limited, PHP is CPU limited, and MySQL is memory limited and disk I/O bound".