NetTus.com has followed up their previous article covering some of the basics of the HTTP protocol with this new post, part 2 of the series. They suggest that HTTP, the messaging format of the web, is the one protocol that every web developer should know.

In my previous article, we covered some of HTTP's basics, such as the URL scheme, status codes and request/response headers. With that as our foundation, we will look at the finer aspects of HTTP, like connection handling, authentication and HTTP caching. These topics are fairly extensive, but we'll cover the most important bits.

In this article, they talk about things like the HTTPS secure version of HTTP, server-side connection handling, identification/authorization and working with caching and cache control headers.

On the Symfony blog, there's two new posts highlighting some recent improvements to the Symfony2 framework - the addition of static page caching and payment validators:

• Static page caching support in the routing configuration
• Payment validators with docblock assertions, including error messages for failures.

These features are all a part of the upcoming Symfony 2.2 release that's planned to be moved in the "stabilization" status in early 2013. It should be able two months following that when the stable version will be released.

For those out there using the CakePHP framework to create your applications, you might be interested in these quick tips from Juan Basso on the Zumba Engineering Blog for both the architecture and actual code to optimize the performance of the app.

Our site and system has a lot of throughput and it make us use more instances and try to reduce the load in every part. It makes the company happy (save money) and also make the customer happy (faster load). On this article I will go over few things in terms of architecture and some code changes/strategies that could make your application faster as well.

Some of the recommendations include:

• Installing the APC/opcode caching to help save execution time
• Avoiding as many network requests as possible
• Use local file/data caching
• Using the "requestAction" inside controllers with its built-in caching

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial from Alejandro Gervasio about subtype polymorphism. It sounds a little scary, but really it's just a look at sub-objects that inherit from parents and how to swap them around at runtime to do different things.

In this article I'll show you how to exploit the virtues that Polymorphism offers through the development of a pluggable cache component. The core functionality can be expanded later to suit your needs through the development of additional cache drivers.

He starts off with the definition of an interface to provide structure to the sample application (the CacheInterface) and implements it in two different subtypes - a FileCache and an AppCache (using the file system and APC, respectively). He builds on these and creates a "View" that uses these caching systems to generate and save the output to a cache for use later in the execution.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his blog with a guide to running mamcached on Windows Azure for PHP, a tool targeted towards PHP on Windows users to provide them with the ability to cache outside of their application.

While Windows Azure offers a distributed caching layer under the form of the Windows Azure Caching, that components currently lacks support for non-.NET technologies. I've heard there's work being done there, but that's not very interesting if you are building your app today. This blog post will show you how to modify a Windows Azure deployment to run and use Memcached in the easiest possible manner. Note: this post focuses on PHP but can also be used to setup Memcached on Windows Azure for NodeJS, Java, Ruby, Python...

He provides a phar-based scaffolding you can use to set up the instance and describes two ways of accomplishing it - the "short way" of relying on the scaffolding or the "long way" describing what the scaffolder does behind the scenes (complete with code). For this, you can also download the source and look through it.

In a new tutorial from the Script-Tutorials.com site, they introduce you to memcache, an external caching tool that can help speed up the performance of your application dramatically.

Today we will talking about caching in PHP again. I will show you how you can use Memcache in PHP. We will prepare useful class for working with Memcache for us and several examples. Memcache itself providing procedural and object oriented interface to memcached, highly effective caching daemon, which was especially designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications.

Included in the article is a simple "CacheMemcache" class that handles the dirty work for you of connecting to the memcache instance and pushing/pulling the data from the remote source. Also included are a few examples of its use - storing simple objects, pulling the same data back out and deleting a record. The source for the tutorial can be downloaded here. You can also find out more about using memcache in the PHP manual (Note: it does require an extension to be loaded to support this functionality).

On Script-Tutorials.com today there's a new article introducing you to using APC caching in your PHP applications. Their simple example sets up a caching class that handles the dirty work for you.

Today I have another interesting article for PHP. We will talking about caching, and practice of using caching in php. I will make review of APC caching and will show you how you can use APC in PHP. [...] Now people have learned to use the server memory for data storage. RAM much faster than hard disk, and the price of memory falls all the time, so let's use all these advantages of this.

Included in the post is the code for a few different files - the caching class itself that implements the APC functions in PHP and some examples of it in use: saving objects, fetching data from the cache and removing things from the cache.

DevShed has posted a new article in their series looking at storage interfaces and how to use them. In this latest article they show how to create a caching layer that will allow you to work with any sort of caching backend you'd like.

As with other elements of object-oriented programming, it's possible to use segregated interfaces in a great variety of scenarios and conditions and, therefore, enjoy the benefits that they provide right out of the box. [...] My goal in this article is to create an extendable caching system based on the contract defined by a segregated interface. To achieve this, the first step we need to take is to create the interface in question.

He shows how to create the "CacheableInterface" that provides the structure for the child interfaces to follow. It provides methods for setting, getting, deleting and checking to see if a key exists. They illustrate its use with an interface to an APC cache, a file caching and a class that uses dependency injection to define the interface to use.

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.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Kevin has posted the latest episode of their ZendCon Sessions podcast series - Ilia Alshanetsky's talk about memcached.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2010 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2010 in Santa Clara, CA and features Ilia Alshanetsky giving his talk: "Memcached, the Better Memcache Interface"

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. There's also slides if you'd like to follow along.