If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about "Advanced PHP Solutions" with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.

PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.

In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.

In this post from Marco van Hylckama Vlieg motivating PHP developers to work harder at their code and move things up to the latest versions.

I placed this entry under 'programming' but it might as well have been placed under 'rants' really. I've been programming PHP for over six years now. It's still definitely my language of choice because of it's speed, ease of use, ease of deployment and last but not least: because of the huge community with all of it's advantages. However there's one thing that's really bugging me lately: PHP is seriously suffering from what a friend of mine called 'the Apache syndrome'. Apache 2.x has been released a long, long time ago. Yet, tons of servers are still running 1.3.x and they probably will continue to do so for years to come.

While this isn't all that serious for a webserver (as long as it serves it's stuff and the server doesn't break it's fine) I believe the case is different with PHP.

He goes on to say that PHP is loosing out on the "coolness factor" to Ruby on Rails, and that most PHP developers out there just aren't taking advantage of the new features/better performance that PHP5 has to offer.