On the ThinkPHP blog today there's a new article looking at some of the best practices they seen when it comes to profiling and benchmarking your PHP-based applications.

Over the years, PHP has evolved from a script language to a programming language used in big applications with high-level architectures. As the most popular language for web applications, PHP is very fast, robust and stable by default. Coming from tiny scripts, PHP is used in large-scale web applications nowadays. In terms of business context, we need to focus on these three key factors: Scalability, Responsiveness and Resource misusage. All three factors have a high impact on hardware costs, customer loyalty and - indirectly - sales.

They mention a few ways that you can use to optimize your application's code including evaluating resource limitations, Firebug caching results and finding bottlenecks with something like XDebug.

On the ThinkPHP blog there's a quick note about a study they've done on the relevance of business goals in the architecture of PHP applications.

PHP software developers and system integrators actually play an important role in running the world's largest web infrastructures. From Facebook, Gruner & Jahr, Kabel Deutschland and Lufthansa to a diversity of corporations, they all trust PHP and the respective systems built with it. It is not questionable that these systems provide a solid software architecture. The point of interest is how these architectures are aligned to the fast pace of changing business goals, which categories of business goals are considered during architecture creation and which means are utilised in projects.

The study (a 24-page study, in English) looks at some of the current strategies businesses are using in their application development, how to consider the right business goals and putting an emphasis on quality and capability of your organization. The study is free, but you'll need to register to get a copy emailed to you.

In a recent post to the php|architect site Marco Tabini has a suggestion of five meta-skills he thinks every PHP developer should learn.

But being a PHP developer is much more than writing PHP code. In fact, good PHP skills would be something that I would take for granted that every PHP developer should have'"and, if enough employers are as crazy as I am, there's a chance that I'm not the only one who wants to look beyond mere PHP to decide who is good and who is exceptional.

His list five of meta-skills for the PHP developer covers a wide range of things, not just involving the technology of web development:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Understanding business
• Coming to grips with reality
• Using the phone
• Being humble

In a recent interview posted on the O'Reilly Radar site, Msc Slocum talks with Kevin Tatroe about what Facebook's HipHop means for business.

Facebook's PHP overhaul, HipHop, reportedly cut CPU usage on the company's servers by around 50 percent. You don't have to be a programmer to understand that kind of result. [...] asked Kevin Tatroe, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming PHP, to weigh in on HipHop's functionality and its broader applications.

Mac starts with some basic questions - how will it help developers, how will it help businesses - and then asks for some clarification as to what the project really is and how difficult Kevin thinks it will be for companies to adopt.

Brandon Savage has posted the fifth part of his "Peer Review" series where he's taken a sample application and worked it over - refactoring, updated to meeting coding standards and abstracting out interfaces to simplify the code. In this latest article he looks at a method to improve the business logic behind the scenes.

So far, we've done quite a bit of work on our Twitter class, making it better. There's still work to be done, though, especially improving the logic. The Twitter class we have now has a number of logical flaws in it that we need to address. Additionally, there are some logical flaws that we started with that I want to highlight, even though we've already fixed them. Let's get started with those.

He looks at a few things like setting the host name as a property, using the return of the HTTP request and handling exceptions (like when Twitter's down). The resulting code is included.

Jim Plush has taken a look at his models in the Zend Framework and has rethought them a bit to work with a bit more complex process than the usual simple sort of Zend Framework application.

The current active record/table gateway patterns just aren't going to cut it for the complex business logic that's approaching. I'm starting to lean towards the domain model approach which would increase the initial complexity of the design but allow for the flexibility for future changes and features. The issue is with where to put your business logic?

He diagrams out his potential solution and includes two bits of code showing how it would work in practice. He's soliciting opinions as to the validity of this approach too, wondering if its the best way to go for more complex application structures requiring these sorts of business requirements.

The NETTUTS.com site has some advice on how you can add a bit more power and flexibility to your PHP applications - shift them over to a multi-tier application structure.

As PHP applications become more and more complex, it can be easy to end up with a tangled mess of code that makes maintenance nearly impossible. Applying the concept of tiered applications can help to alleviate some of the difficulty in maintaining complex applications.

Tiered programming is a method that splits up the components of an application (like a separation between presentation and business logic). They talks about what a setup like that might gain you, the wrong way to do it and the right way that splits it out into the database tier, the business tier and the presentation tier.

Ken Guest has posted about a whitepaper that he was involved in editing - the PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper:

As far as I know this is the first full English language translation and update of the work done by the Association Francaise des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP Users Group). Also there is a lot of new content in the Whitepaper that with regards to how PHP is now utilised in Enterprise. Figures have been updated and techniques available in later versions of PHP have been referenced.

He mentions some of the challenges in the translation and thanks a few others for the effort and contributions they made to the project. The whitepaper (pdf) looks at several key topics of PHP in the Enterprise including: suggestions for architecture, integration issues, concurrent use with other languages and how PHP fits into the web application ecosystem.

With more and more frameworks popping up every day in the PHP community, it's important to ask yourself one question - should I learn a framework? Ian Christian tries to answer that question in a recent post to his blog.

With other programming languages designed for the web, there's typically a framework that works hand in hand. [...] I imagine people will always write from the ground up with PHP, some people do it to learn, some I suspect think there's nothing out there that can do what they want, where as others perhaps do it just to prove themselves, or to gain fame. Good luck to them all, some of them are probably going to do a good job, but alas - I imagine most are wasting their time.

He breaks his opinions out into two sides of the argument - the business issues and the developer side, each with their own plusses and minuses. Overall, though, he definitely suggests learning some kind of framework, even if you don't end up working with it - it's just good experience.

Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.