Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

The Zend Framework team has officially released the latest version of the framework - hopefully the first and last beta before the stable release - Beta 0.9.0.

We're pleased to announce Zend Framework Beta Release 0.9.0. This is the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. This marks a new milestone for the Framework project, because with the status of Beta, we are establishing the feature set for Zend Framework 1.0, and we are adopting a commitment to backward-compatibility and interface stability.

Updates in this release include three new components moved into the core (Zend_Translate, Zend_Auth, and Zend_Db_Adapter using mysqli) as well as improvements to things like the MVC output buffering, Zend_Mail features, the inclusion of the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, Zend_Service_Delicious and Zend_Service_Simpy and much more. Check out the full release announcement for more and the development wiki for where things are headed.