The odinjobs website recently interviewed several PHPers in the community about their perspectives on PHP as a language and some of the resources they recommend. Among those on the list are Jeff Moore, Vidyut Luther, Matthew Turland and Richard Heyes.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), was introduced in 1998 by Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski and Rasmus Lerdorf (the original PHP/FI creator). In less than 10 years, there are over 20 million internet domains hosted on servers with PHP installed (source: Wiki). We will talk to our PHP experts to see why they think PHP rocks

Here's the questions they asked:

• If you were to start afresh, would you learn PHP again?
• What do you think is the most important feature of the PHP language?
• What PHP forums would you recommend?
• What book would you recommend to a newbie?
• Name a programming language that you would like to learn? (if you had the time & resources, of course)

Check out the full article for their answers to these questions.

Patrick Reilly has posted about a new group that's being formed in the PHP world - a PHP Evangelism Team designed to help promote the language.

The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.

They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.

Rich McIver has provided a guide of sorts for companies out there to help "attract, retain and utilize rock star programmers" for their business:

There are plenty of programmers out there, but rock star programmers? They are few and far between. Learn how to locate these gems and keep them happy with the resources below.

The article is broken up into five different sections:

• Job Sites
• Locating Quality Programmers
• Screening
• Care and Feeding of Programmers
• Other Considerations

There's tons of links under each with some good advice not only for those doing the interview but also for the interviewee trying to land the job.

DevShed continues their look at standalone PHP scripts (server-side scripting, not on the web) in part two, "Managing Standalone Scripts in PHP" excerpted from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle.

Last week, we began our discussion of PHP standalone scripts. This week, we'll be talking about child processes, shared resources, signals, and writing daemons.

They jump right in, going first for a look at forking off child processes from the script using the pcntl functionality you'll need to build into PHP. Resource management is key to working with server scripts, and they show you how to close them out when you're through. Next up is a brief look at the types of signals that you can send to the child processes, and some good rules to follow for writing daemons in PHP.

WebReference.com has a new sample chapter from Sara Goleman's book "Extending and Embedding PHP" (Chapter 3) taking a look at memory management in PHP.

One of the most jarring differences between a managed language like PHP, and an unmanaged language like C is control over memory pointers.

The chapter looks at:

• Freeing up unneeded resources
• Handling error requests correctly
• An introduction to the Zend Memory Manager
• Counting references to avoid unnecessary copying
• The usefulness of "copy on write"
• Saving resources with "change on write"
• Difficulties with handling seperation of values

Each of the above items is accompanied by a good bit of text and code examples where appropriate (even a diagram or two to make things clearer).

Adam Trachtenburg has linked two resources that PHP5 developers out there working with SOAP might find handy:

• Writing SOAP clients and servers with PHP5 - a presentation from Michael Rasmussen
• Webservice Helper - WSDL generator PHP 5 - just what it says, a library to help with the creation of web services with SOAP, including creating the WSDL file.

Neither of these were tested by Adam but they both definitely sound interesting (and both pretty up-to-date).

The Zend site has published part three of their "Extension Writing" tutorials, this time focusing on the management of resources in your extensions.

Up until now, you've worked with concepts that are familiar and map easily to userspace analogies. In this tutorial, you'll dig into the inner workings of a more alien data type - completely opaque in userspace, but with behavior that should ultimately inspire a sense of deja vu.

They start things off by describing what resources are in the Zend Engine, initializing your resources, using them, and destroying them. They mention different kinds of resources, including normal and persistent resources. There's code for each step of the way, including a sanity check at the end.

On his blog today, Andi Gutmans has posted his feelings on the growing trend of PHP developers turnng to the C level of things to add new functionality to the PHP development.

One thing I have noticed, is that quite often, PHP developers who are seeking for new PHP features are prematurely trying to implement them in C. Although, there are definitely cases where you want to write your code in C, I think in some cases PHP is too quickly dismissed.

Developing features in PHP not only takes less time, but is also less prone to bugs, easier to maintain, and more stable and secure. Also, in the majority of cases, whether such a feature were implemented in C or PHP, would not make a significant different to overall application performance.

He gives the example of the ZSearch functionality that they mentioned in the php|architect webcast for the Zend framework - entirely implemented in PHP, not C. He also mentions a point that web developers would do good to take to heart - the bottlenecks usually aren't in the code - it's dealing with external resources that's the problem...