The NETTUTS.com site has posted a new PHP-related screencast that covers a simple script to scan over the contents of folders in PHP. To illustrate, they create an image gallery script that mirrors the filesystem structure.

Let's imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. [...] In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your "portfolio" folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders - and PHP will do the rest. Let's build it now!

The screencast comes complete with the entire source and a link to a demo to show the end result.

Following up on this post from David Sklar, Mike Naberezny has come up with a few methods of his own to come up with his "thousand string concatenations".

It's been a while since David Sklar called out to let a thousand string concatenations bloom. That discussion produced some entertaining suggestions for putting strings together such as using preg_replace and calling out to MySQL with SELECT CONCAT.

Mike goes with a bit different media of choice - the filesystem functions and streams. One example opens a file, writes to the file then rewinds back to the beginning of the stream. He modified this to make it slightly more useful (writing to memory not the file system) and shows how it could be used to make a temporary stream for testing purposes.

Davey Shafik has gotten more than a little excited by the streams functionality in his latest blog post:

PHP streams are absolutely amazing. As mentioned by Elizabeth Smith (a great read if you don't know how to use streams) PHP streams are super powerful. Streams is something that is (to my knowledge) unique to PHP. The closest thing I've seen to it, is Linux's FUSE "user space" (i.e. not kernel module) file systems.

He shows an example of a stream in action and suggests an interface he'd like to see - an automatic connection to the Amazon S3 storage.

In this new blog post, Evert Pot talks about getting the most out of your web-based applications through some simple caching types - filesystem, APC, and Memcached.

Caching is very important and really pays off in big internet applications. When you cache the data you're fetching from the database, in a lot of cases the load on your servers can be reduced enormously.

For each of the three caching types, they provide some code and include some discussion around it (like the strategies surrounding using it, problems with its use, and why it would even be used at all). Installations are included where needed (like for the memcached stuff) to get you up and running quickly.

It's not really a comparison so much as just stating what's out there, but it's a good place to start if you're new to caching in your applications.

PHPit.net has another beginner-level tutorial posted on its site today - this time, with a low level look at some of the file functions that PHP has to offer.

Welcome to this beginner's introduction to PHP's file functions. In this article I will take you through all the inbuilt filesystem functions, and explain them. This article is mainly geared towards beginners, but it could still be useful to more advanced developers as a simple refresher.

This article will show you how to do the following things: reading files (using several different methods), writing files, copying files, deleting files, getting file properties (like last modified time, last access time, etc), checking file permissions, reading directories, and more!

The article touches on all of the major ones including explainations all along the way. There's plenty of code examples that are simple and to the point as well...