On the Oracle Technology Network today there's a new article from Rasmus Lerdorf about the current release of the language (PHP 5.4) and what he sees as the future for PHP.

Almost exactly eight years ago I wrote an article for the Oracle Technology Network called, "Do You PHP?". In that article, I talked about PHP's stubborn, function-over-form approach to solving the "Web problem" and the fight to keep things simple. We were getting close to releasing PHP 5.0 at the time. Now here we are almost a decade later with a shiny new PHP 5.4.0 release, and while much has happened during that time, there are also many things that haven't changed at all.

The first talks about what's the same - the ecosystem surrounding the language and the strength of the LAMP stack that PHP helped to "found". He mentions some of the up-and-comers that are alternatives to this traditional setup and some of the extensions that have been added to improve PHP's functionality (DateTime, PDO, JSON support). He talks about other improvements in the language including:

• Better memory management
• Traits
• Short Array Syntax
• Closure binding
• Built-in webserver
• Native session handler interface
• Removal of register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode

He briefly looks ahead at "what's next" for the language and points to the "internals" mailing list and the PHP wiki

On the Ibuildings techPortal today, they've posted the latest in their DPC Radio series of podcasts - recordings from this year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this latest episode, they share Christopher Jones' talk "Developing and Deploying High Performance PHP Applications".

This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment. The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database.

Technologies mentioned include connection pooling, monitoring, caching and suspending/resuming transactions for stateful web applications. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can find his slides over on the Oracle Technology Network.

Chris Jones has a new post today sharing a schedule of a few scripting-related sessions coming up at Oracle's OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences.

Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences are happening in San Francisco next week. It will be a busy and exciting time.

The PHP-related sessions are at OpenWorld this year including:

• High-Performance Web Applications with C/C++/PHP/Python
• Develop and Deploy High-Performance Web 2.0 PHP, Ruby, or Python Applications
• PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl: Develop and Deploy Mission-Critical Apps with Oracle Database 11g
• Extending Oracle E-Business Suite with Ruby on Rails

For more information on the OpenWorld conference (happening October 2nd through 6th in Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA) take a look at the main event site.

Alberto Viana has a new post to his blog about using Oracle ZML Types with a Zend Framework application. He created a custom adapter to create the type and handle the binding/execution on an new OCI8 connection.

So few days ago I needed to insert Oracle XMLtype with Zend Framework. I used oracle adapter to wrote it in Zend Framework. I was looking for and I found on Chris Jones Blog.

His table has a column defined as an XMLType, a special data type specifically for working with XML datasets directly in the database. His adapter includes a bit of sample XML and the code needed to bind the data as a CLOB and, using the writeTemporary function.

Chris Jones has posted a quick note to his blog today about some new PHP packages that are available from Oracle of 5.3.8 (RPM) with one of the latest OCI8 extensions already included.

I've built PHP 5.3.8 RPM packages with various common extensions (and the latest OCI8 1.4.6) for Linux x64. They are downloadable at oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These binaries might be useful for quick testing. They are unsupported.

He points to packages on the ULN site if you're looking for something a bit more stable. The OCI 1.4.6 version of the extension includes a few new features but was mostly a test suite update.

In a new post to his blog Chris Jones talks about a new way Oracle's developed to run PHP applications - Oracle Tuxedo, a web application server with specific support for PHP.

Oracle Tuxedo provides a scalable and highly available mid tier platform capable of managing and integrating heterogeneous applications. This overview datasheet explains its capabilities: "Oracle Tuxedo provides a service-oriented infrastructure for efficiently routing, dispatching, and managing requests, events, and application queues across system processes and application services".

If you'd like to give it a shot, you can download one of their developer virtual machines and give it a look. A tutorial is included inside as well as Netbeans and MySQL.

The latest post on Chris Jones's blog walks you through the process, step-by-step, of how to build PHP 5.3 with support for the Oracle HTTP server included with the 11g version of the database.

I get the impression that not a lot of people in the PHP community are using Itanium. There are enough warnings during PHP compilation that would make me extremely uncomfortable using it for production applications. A PHP on Itanium installation bug that I logged long ago has not been patched, indicating to me that not many PHP people are investing time in the platform. I can't recommend using Itanium platform for PHP. Anyway, I had a need and here are the steps for posterity.

It's a pretty simple process (if you're used to compiling your own software):

• Checks the OS and compiler to ensure needed tools are installed
• Set up the Oracle environment variables
• Set up the PHP environment
• Copy over the needed header files
• Extract PHP and modify its configure slightly
• make distclean and then configure

Chris Jones has posted more information to his Oracle blog about the caching and other improvements that come along with the Oracle 11gR2 release that can be used in PHP applications.

Oracle 11.2 brought several improvements to Client Result Caching. CRC is way for the results of queries to be cached in the database client process for reuse. [...] PHP OCI8 as a "client" of the database can use CRC. The cache is per-process, so plan carefully before caching large data sets. Tables that are candidates for caching are look-up tables where the network transfer cost dominates.

Like many of the other server-side tools Oracle has to offer, it's pretty simple to enable this caching. Before you had to add a custom bit to your query to tell it to enable the caching. Now it's as simple as setting it up on the CREATE or ALTER for the table - nothing extra for the developer to do.

Chris Jones has posted some "pictures" of the performance that an Oracle database sees when it uses the connection pooling versus the normal connect/allocate sort of connection with the Oracle OCI8 driver for PHP. As you can see, the differences in memory consumption are huge.

Here is a screen shot from a PHP OCI8 connection pooling demo that I like to run. It graphically shows how little database host memory is needed when using DRCP connection pooling with Oracle Database 11g. Migrating to DRCP can be as simple as starting the pool and changing the connection string in your PHP application.

He also describes the differences between the pooled and non-pooled connections (to the developer it's as easy as putting ":pooled" in the connect string) in his graphs, and notes that using the pooling doesn't just have to be for large site - smaller sites can benefit too.

As mentioned by Chris Jones today, the Oracle Technology Network has posted a few new tutorials in their "Oracle By Example" series. Two of them deal with using PHP and the 11g version of the Oracle database.

The first, Using PHP with Oracle Database 11g, is an introduction to some of the basics of interacting with the database including using connection pooling and tips on query optimization.

The second tutorial, Developing a PHP Web Application with Oracle Database 11g, shows you how to build up a basic company portal with the help of the Zend Framework and the Netbeans IDE.