Loïc Faugeron, author of the recent "Ultimate Guide" to Symfony components series has a new kind of post to his site today. In this latest article he shows you how to integrate Symfony and ReactPHP for "super speed Symfony" sites.

HTTP frameworks, such as Symfony, allow us to build applications that have the potential to achieve Super Speed.

A first way to make use of it is to run our application as a HTTP server. In this article we'll take a Symfony application and demonstrate how to run it as HTTP server using ReactPHP.

He walks you through the installation of the ReactPHP HTTP server and provides some simple code to get a server up and running. He uses this to provide a "Hello world" example and helps you test it to be sure everything's up and running as expected. He then creates a basic Symfony application that uses the HttpFoundationRequest handling to wrap that same server and yield the same results. He includes some benchmarking examples and some updates he needed to make to have it work correctly with the Blackfire.io profiling service. He ends the post with a look at some of the alternatives to ReactPHP (including IcicleIO, Aerys and PHP FastCGI), why it improves performance and how to make it production ready with [] Supervisord(http://supervisord.org/).

On the SitePoint WordPress blog they've made an official list of the most popular plugins for 2014 according to WordPress.org's own "Most Popular" list. They provide links to the plugins, descriptions of what they do and the current number of downloads (at the time of the post).

You might have noticed that WordPress.org lists the most popular plugins in the right sidebar in the plugins directory. As we’re nearing the end of 2014, I thought it would be interesting to not only provide a quick explanation of each of these plugins, but to also explore some of the other popular alternatives. Just because a plugin is listed in the most popular list, doesn’t always mean it’s the best fit for your project. [...] It’s not a definitive list, only based on my experiences. Hopefully you’ll come across a few new plugins that you might not yet have heard of!

Plugins in their list include both some familiar names and some newcomers to the top of the pack:

• Akismet
• Contact Form 7
• Jetpack
• WordFence
• WooCommerce

As mentioned, each comes with a brief description of what they do, a link to their page on the plugin site as well as links to a few other alternatives if it's not the perfect fit.

The PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) has been helping to define standards that can be adopted by projects to make them easier to cross-pollinate and give developers more choices with less hassle. One of the latest to be proposed by the group is PSR-6, the Caching proposal. For those not familiar with it, Robert Hafner has written up an introduction to the proposal and what it all entails.

There’s been a lot of discussion about PSR-6, the php-fig caching interfaces, so I thought it was time to step in and describe what this system is all about. Be prepared to read far more about caching interfaces than you probably thought possible.

He starts with a look at why a standard like this might be necessary (and links to the PSR-6 docs for the official word). He does also mention some alternative proposals and gets into details - with code examples - of each of them and shows how they relate back to what's proposed in PSR-6. He finishes off the post with a brief Q&A trying to dispel some of the myths that have com up around the standard. These include "This is all just too complex", "The Pool/Item model isn’t used anywhere" and " This is just standardizing Stash", each with their own summary and feedback.

The LAMP package (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is great for a lot of the developer world out there, but sometimes needs change and people (and their software) just need to adapt to a different environment. It's nice to know, though, that there are good alternatives to these four pieces of software and this new article from Informit.com will put you in tune with them.

Most Free Software users are familiar with the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack—the LAMP configuration—a widely deployed set of software used for a large number of Internet and intranet applications. Although the LAMP configuration is the most frequently used, it's not always the best tool for any given job. This article proposes some alternatives.

Here's some of the alternatives they mention:

• Linux - OpenBSD, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetBSD
• Apache - LightTPD, Yaws, and Tux
• MySQL - PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird, Apache Derby
• PHP - CGI/FastCGI, Seaside/Smalltalk, Ruby on Rails, GNUstepWeb

For each of the alternative technologies, they mention briefly what it is and how it can be use to replace that one of the "final four".

The LAMP package (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is great for a lot of the developer world out there, but sometimes needs change and people (and their software) just need to adapt to a different environment. It's nice to know, though, that there are good alternatives to these four pieces of software and this new article from Informit.com will put you in tune with them.

Most Free Software users are familiar with the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack—the LAMP configuration—a widely deployed set of software used for a large number of Internet and intranet applications. Although the LAMP configuration is the most frequently used, it's not always the best tool for any given job. This article proposes some alternatives.

Here's some of the alternatives they mention:

• Linux - OpenBSD, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetBSD
• Apache - LightTPD, Yaws, and Tux
• MySQL - PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird, Apache Derby
• PHP - CGI/FastCGI, Seaside/Smalltalk, Ruby on Rails, GNUstepWeb

For each of the alternative technologies, they mention briefly what it is and how it can be use to replace that one of the "final four".