The results from the latest poll the International PHP Magazine conducted this past week are in. The question they asked developers to respond to was "Which One of the Following Ensures Smooth Implementation of PHP Sessions?".

Options this time were:

• Don't use underscore in host names
• Commit your session before it redirects
• Prevent session fixation
• Don't expose session_id's

The results were pretty close for all of the options with one coming out on top (committing the session) and two tying for second - preventing session fixation and not exposing session IDs.

Subversion and Symfony users should cast their votes in this week's poll. It asks, of the four options given, which is your favorite "trick" to running the Symfony framework with Subversion.

Jacob Santos has started a series of posts to his blog that focuses on the use of the opcode cache and language features in your applications.

The posts will be researched and go through multiple drafts for professionalism before posting. In this hope, it will strive to enable discussion that isn't flaming and collective of the topic at hand. For as much as I can achieve at my level of writing skill and researching the topic at hand.

He he goes through the purpose of the posts, the areas he's going to focus on, some about the theory that will be used, and the implementation and documentation he'll provide through the series.

The OC Food Review blog has posted part one of a two part series covering the creation of a location-based search engine. They're currently implementing it into their site and wanted to share the knowledge.

Conceptually, location based searching is pretty straight-forward: find out where you are, find out how far you're willing to travel, and compare your location against the locations of all your choices. If the distance between where you are and what you're interested in is less than what you're willing to travel, add it to your results list. Simple, right? Right.

He talks more about the concepts behind the search and one of the keys to the entire process - geocoding. They opted to go with the Yahoo! Maps API to grab this information. There's some sample REST urls and the output of the results after they've been unserialized.

They've even created their own class to make things even simpler. It does require that you have cURL installed with your PHP5 installation, but outside of that, there are no other dependencies.

Alexey Zakhlestin shares with us in this new blog post, how the fast-cgi PHP developers think they're using isn't really a true FastCGI.

Most PHP programmers believe, that PHP has support for FastCGI. They refer to fastcgi-sapi, which is bundled with php since long ago, and which was recently reimplemented for PHP 5.1.3/4. This SAPI really does exist and actually working quite good. But… it is not a real fast-cgi. It is just an imitation of mod_php which is linked against fastcgi api, instead of apache api. So, it's time for you to ask: if it exists and works, then what am I talking here about? Let's start from the basics...

He talks about a history of how things go to where they are, starting back with regular CGI scripts, moving up through using server-based APIs, and finally to FastcGI, a method for overcoming a lot of the limitations of its predecessors.

With that look back, he turns his attention around and looks to the current situation within PHP. He talks about the sudden appearance fastcgi made in PHP's SAPIs, but that the implementation wasn't true. He suggests that the reasoning behind this "fake" implementation was for the sake of speed. He also notes, however, it's his opinion that true FastCGI support in PHP will be a requirement for future large-scale applications.

On Jason Sheet's blog, there's a new post that offers up a brief tutorial on implementing the soundex functionality in PHP.

Soundex is an algorithim to help determine if a word sounds like another word; it is commonly used to detect words that are incorrectly spelled or to make the suggestion "did you mean ? instead of !?" For example if you typed in smythe using soundex a program could look for other names that sound like it and find that smith and smythe sound alike.

In this article I will demonstrate a PHP implementation of soundex, in practice this implementation has little value because PHP itself has soundex() function already but this article should help you understand how it works better.

He jumps right in, mentioning the steps the script will take (seven of them) before getting right to the code. He's written up his own soundex functionality packaged up nicely in a reusable function and has even compared it to the built-in PHP soundex function for accuracy.

DevShed has published the first in a new series that looks to explain the implementation and core concepts behind using iterators in PHP. This time, they look at creating this environment in PHP4.

Here, I'm not going to offer a full reference for what each design pattern is. You can buy a book to learn that, or even do some "googling" and find other helpful resources that probably will treat the subject much more extensively. Instead, I'll provide you with a concise explanation of what an Iterator is, in conjunction with numerous sample codes, which hopefully will help you understand much more easily how it can applied in PHP object-oriented programming.

They start off by looking at what the Iterator pattern is - the setup of a pseudo-class and an explaination of how it works. They follow this with a functional example and creating a subclass off of the generic base class.