On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to use a little PHP magic to compress your CSS automatically.

There are many ways to compress CSS files or automatically generate browser-specific CSS3 prefixes, but usually extra tools are used which is very annoying. I'd like to show you how such tasks can be done using only PHP.

Complete code for this small script is included in the article. It uses some regular expressions to parse the CSS and does some replacement and removal of things from the CSS content to slim it down and format it all as one line. There are some images illustrating the process also included.

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi has a new post looking at an interesting, if seldom used, feature of recent PHP releases - packaging applications with phar archives.

Phar is a php extensions that provides the means for distributing code as a single archive, that does not have to be extracted to a folder before usage. The concept is similar to JVM Jars: each archive becomes a virtual directory where files can be accessed. However, the virtual folder is not limited to class loading, but you can open and read internal files as if it were decompresse into a directory.

He includes a brief "hello world" example of packaging up a script into a phar archive and executing it via PHP. He also shows how easy it is to create an archive from current code, making an archive containing the latest Doctrine 2 release for simple inclusion. Phars also allow compression and hashing but has issues with resource management and access external files.

NetTuts.com has come up with a Phing (the automated build tool written in PHP) build script that designers can drop in as a part of their deployment process to compress, concatenate and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts.

We've created a build script for Phing that will give designers the ability to automatically compress, concatenate, and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts - simply by typing five characters. I'll show you how to use it in this quick tip video.

The post includes a screencast showing you how to get it all set up and working with the rest of your Phing install. They don't help you set up Phing - you'll need that already set up and running to use the task. You can grab teh script directly from github.

Sander Marechal has been working with Phing in some of his recent development and has created something useful for compressing Javascript and CSS files on the deployment of your application - a YuiCompressor task.

I am going to write several useful extensions, the first of which is a YuiCompressorFilter. Phing already has support for a JavaScrip minifier in the form of the JsMinTask, but the yui-compressor is more useful. Not only does it usually compress better than JsMin, it can also compress CSS files. Also, because my YuiCompressor extension is implemented as a filter instead of a task you can do fancy things like minifying and concatenating files in a single step.

He includes both a sample of the task and it's configuration (the XML) in the post as well as a link to its source over on github.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a quick new post showing you how to create a Javascript compressor tool with PHP that uses the Closure Compiler from Google.

In my previous post, I discussed the Closure Compiler's REST API. In this article, we'll develop a small PHP program that shows how the API can be used to compress JavaScript code whenever you need it.

He shows how to compress three "script" tags down into one that defines multiple files for the engine to grab and compress. This is passed into a PHP file that grabs the file and passes the data off to the Closure Compiler for handling (via curl). The result is then passed back and served up with a content type of "text/javascript" back to the browser.

As Thomas Weidner mentions in a new blog post, starting with the 1.10 release of the Zend Framework there'll be a new component to help with compressing and decompressing files - Zend_Filter_Compress/Decompress.

The new components Zend_Filter_Compress and Zend_Filter_Decompress provide a unified API for several compression formats. Actually the formats BZ2, GZ, LZF, RAR, TAR and ZIP are implemented: You can not only work with Strings, but also with Files and also with complete Directories.

He includes a quick example of how it will work with both data (like a string) and writing out the information to a compressed file. You can find out more about the component from Thomas' proposal on the Zend Framework wiki.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article posted looking to help you squeeze the most performance you can out of the Zend Platform application from Zend on your IBM i machine.

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the more confusing issues that customers face with Zend Platform on IBM i is the impact on development machines. Most will try out Zend Platform in a development environment or on a development LPAR.

There's three things they suggest to tweak to help you get the most out of Platform - code acceleration, dynamic content caching and code compression.

In this recent post to his blog Michael Caplan looks at a feature of PHP that's sometimes forgotten when pushing out larger chunks of data - flushing.

As a recluse who prefers hiding behind servers rather than dancing around your web browser's canvas, I was intrigued with their server side recommendations - however sparse they may be. In particular, flushing generated head content early to speed up overall page delivery and rending time was a technique new to me.

Michael looks at what "flushing generated head content" means and includes a scenario - pulling the top palettes from the COLOURlovers site - and some performance stats on page load time and response time directly from the server (complete with graphs).

Derick Rethans phar. More specifically, he tried it out on the eZ Components framework, trying to make a complete release package.

A phar is to PHP what a jar is to Java. I spent a little time to see how easy it would be to make our latest eZ Components release into a workable phar.

He includes the few lines of code to make a package (four in his case) and a one-liner on how to use it in your application. Building the package is as easy as running a PHP command line call.

Others in the community have picked up on Derick's post and have checked into phar themselves - Sebastian Bergmann and Stuart Herbert (on benchmarking phar).

Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.

The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.

He talks about a few different aspects:

• PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc)
• RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving)
• HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)