Thanks to PHPEverywhere for a great link this morning to a page where PHP and ASP are benchmarked (again). The article is in French, so you might need the Fish to help you out. The basic idea was that PHP outperformed ASP in the trials that they did - everything from a simple "Hello World" to heavy string manipulation. PHP came out on top, largely because most of the functionality that they tested comes native to PHP (or is part of the compile), where as ASP requires the help of outside programs and software to get some of these things done (like database access).

Just a small note from Zend - they have the latest Weekly Summary posted today. Nothing major in here - there's details on socket extensions, building with Cygwin, and some other smaller fixes that are going to be in the next version.

Also today, DevArticles.com, that fount of knowledge, has a new article out there that talks about Creating a Credit Card Validation Class With PHP. Anyone can just stick up a web page with a credit card form and make it work, but if you want to make it work right, you need something like this. In this article we're going to work through developing a PHP class that stores the details of a credit card and validates its number using the Mod 10 algorithm. It looks like a pretty straight-forward class, with simple enough code, but it could be very handy when accepting those cards you need to make 100% sure are correct.

Oh, and just so everyone out there knows, the dowtime these past few days (and other trobules) was caused by a bad CPU fan that died and took the power supply for the box with it. It's all been replaced and is back up and working, but that doesn't get up back the time that we lost...sorry again for the inconvience. Don't worry - we're not going anywhere...