On his site today Lukasz Kujawa has a post that compares some performance benchmarks of several popular PHP frameworks including Slim, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Symfony2 and Zend Framework 2.

There are many assumptions around performance of different PHP frameworks. I frequently hear strong opinions about superiority X over Y in this context. There are companies writing new PHP frameworks from scratch because available solutions are too slow for them. What does it really mean? Does the framework performance matters? Before answering this questions lets check how slow is your framework!

He took the "quick start" projects provided for each of the examples and ran some tests with the Apache Benchmark (ab) tool against EC2 instances, all configured the same way. The results weren't overly surprising with Slim beating the others hands down (it's a micro-framework after all) and Kohana and CodeIgniter coming in second and third. The frameworks with more overhead like Zend Framework and Symfony ranked some of the slowest.

Fortrabbit.com has conducted a survey of developers world-wide about what kind of platform, tools and software they use in their development work. They've posted the results to their site today, the answers from about 160 different developers.

We have asked our readers a few questions on their PHP workflows, hosting and tools. We are very curious about this, because we want to build the best PHP PaaS for dev guys.

Some of the highlights from their findings include the large share of Zend Framework use, the predominant use of git for deployment, MySQL still being the database of choice and multi-stage deployment (environments) are a preferred setup. You can see the full results here [pdf].

On the Symfony Blog there's a new post sharing the results of a recent poll they took of some of their developers covering things like job title, how long they've been working with Symfony and their work with the framework.

Before the Symfony Live Conference in Paris, we conducted the first Symfony community survey. The raffle winners will soon be contacted by Anne-Sophie. And without further ado, here are the survey results!

Results are posted both in numbers and in easy to read graphs to questions like:

• What is your job?
• How did you get to know symfony?
• Do you use any other PHP framework/CMS?
• What is the average size of projects that you/your company work on?
• How do you get trained?

The last question is interesting - it asked the community how many would be interested in getting a Symfony certification. The results were almost broken into equal thirds of "yes", "no" and "somewhat interested. You can see the full results here.

Zend has published the results of their "Developer Pulse" survey for 2012 - the product of a survey of over three thousand developers across the PHP community.

The summer 2012 edition of the Zend Developer Pulse™ survey shows that PHP is gaining prominence as a cloud application development language of choice. The combination of speed and ease of use enables developers to build and deploy PHP-based cloud applications quickly: more than half the developers surveyed indicated that the apps they are developing today are destined to be deployed in cloud environments.

You can view the full results of the report in this PDF which touches on topics like:

• Developing in the cloud
• Working with APIs
• Versions of PHP developers are using
• Tools & best practices

In this new press release Zend has announced the posting of the results from their "Zend Developer Pluse" survey - a survey taken of developers world-wide about their habits, preferences and desires.

Zend Technologies addresses [the question of how a new demand for a new generation of apps] in Zend Developer Pulse, a new survey series that takes the pulse of a vibrant community of developers from around the world. The company's first developer survey conducted in late November 2011 offers insights on emerging technology and career trends captured from 3,335 respondents. The findings are summarized in a report now available at [http://www.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-0112-EN.pdf].

The press release mentions some of the details from the survey including that 66% of developers will be working with mobile app development projcts, that next-generation UI deveopment scored high in skillsets, there was a strong interest in cloud development and that there's been a strong rise in the need for PHP development skills in the last year.

You can read the entire report here.

In an informal poll Lorna Mitchell recently asked fellow developers to weigh in on what static analysis tool they used on their code. She's posted the results to her blog today with one of the tools being a clear winner.

My interest was mostly because I'm working on a book chapter which includes some static analysis content, and there are a couple of these tools that I include in my own builds, but I don't do much with the output of them. However I didn't want to drop anything from the chapter if it was actually a valuable tool and I was just missing the point - pretty much all the tools got a good number of votes though, so I'll be covering all of the [options].

According to her results, the most used tool by developers is the PHP_CodeSniffer with the PHP Mess Detector and PHP Copy & Paste Detector tied for second place.

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted the results of a poll taken a little while back concerning what people thought was the best feature of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

After two weeks, we have closed the poll among the PHP community of Web Builder Zone to establish which are the most wanted features, which will influence development of applications on PHP 5.4. Hopefully this poll would also shape our focus in tutorials in the future - I personally plan to dedicate more time to the winning features.

Runners up included the removal of magic quotes and strict mode with the top three being (in this order) the upload progress patch, traits and the array improvements leading the pack. You can see the results here.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the results of their Ibuildings challenge where the developer had to create a script able to play "Four in a Line" based on an abstract Player class provided.

Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill.

There were three different categories - junior, medium and senior - and one winner for each:

• Junior: Xavier Van Herpe (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Medium: Piotr Mlocek (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Senior: Tomas Creemes (won the iPad)

They also include some observations about the code submitted to the competition including adherence to coding standards and overall performance.

On DZone.com today the results of their framework poll have been posted with some not-so-surprising results base on popularity and number of users in general.

A disclaimer: creating this poll was a bit of a catch-22, as I could not include all PHP frameworks (would have been a very long list) and had to make a selection based on popularity; of course that meant a guess by using Twitter and google results, but the ultimate popularity of the framework, at least in the audience of Web Builder Zone, would only be established by a poll. I thank you for the participation and the suggestions: we had more than one thousand votes, and this means we gathered responses from a statistically valid sample of the PHP community.

According to the results, the Zend Framework comes in at first place with Symfony and CodeIgniter coming in just behind. CakePHP was in fourth and "Other" in fifth. He points out that the top three frameworks all have something in common - they're all company-backed, but still derive a large part of their contributions from the community.

The results of this month's Bug Hunt Day for the Zend Framework are in and the Zend Developer Zone has posted about the champions and stats for the event.

In just 3 short days, contributors managed to resolve exactly 111 issues. Fitting though, if you think about it, since this is the 1.11 branch for Zend Framework: 111 issues, 1.11 branch release... I'd like to say we planned it that way, but alas, it was merely coincidental the way these numbers worked out.

The champion for this month's event is Ryan Mauger (Bittarman) who closed a huge 28 issues out of the 111 himself. He also points out the work that Ramon Henrique Ornelas has done in the past months to help things move towards the Zend Framework 2.0 mark.