On his blog today Shameer Chamal has a new post about a framework he's recently developed an appreciation for (he calls it "awesome" in fact) - Kohana.

In this article we will discuss some important features of Kohana, a promising and the sexiest community driven php framework. This article is pretty basic and intended to instigate those who are still not familiar with this framework. One of the problem with this framework is the lack of well organized documentation. Anyway there are many useful resources available and I have mentioned some of them at the end of this article.

He talks about some of the things he likes best about the framework including its HMVC (hierarchical Model view controller) support allowing you to cascade files down, allowing overrides at any level (good illustration here). He also talks about the scalability it offers and how, because of the HMVC functionality, you can split things up into interchangeable parts that can be pulled in based on the situation. Other features briefly mentioned include easy configuration, security and the exception handling and profiling.

From the Insidesigns blog there's a new tutorial showing how you can create a scalable messaging application that works similarly to the instant message platforms users are used to. Their method combines PHP and a MVC approach.

Most social networking sites support two types of messages: public and private messages. Private messages are generally sent in a similar fashion to e-mails, and public messages being posted on user's profiles for other users to see. In this article by Michael Peacock, author of the book PHP 5 Social Networking, we will learn how to allow users to post private messages to each other.

They start with the database structure (specifying things like sender, message and the message) and move into the models to connect the scripts to them. Then they progress into the controllers and views for listing messages, reading a message, viewing and deleting a message. Full code is provided in the post, ready for cut and paste.

A new tutorial has been posted to the Zend Developer Zone today looking at making scalable vector graphics with PHP and the hep of one of two charting packages - ezcGraph or SVGGraph (examples are provided for both).

Programmatically generating graphs and charts using SVG requires a deep understanding of the SVG specification and the various SVG primitives, as well as a fair amount of time for research, experimentation and debugging. Or, in other words, that's your entire weekend shot! Fortunately, help is at hand. There are a number of open-source PHP libraries that support SVG chart generation, and using them can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in adding this feature to a Web application.

He shows how to create simple images like bar, line and pie charts as well as adding in other things like a legend, custom titles and a sample where the user can define the sizes of a pie chart via some form input fields. Screenshots are included for all code examples to give you a better idea of the end result.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today they've published the latest episode in their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 podcast series. This time it's Eli White's talk on highly scalable web applications.

A constant pariah on web applications is scaling once you become popular. It's not always an easy task (ok, never). This talk will go into depth on a few of the most common techniques for making your website scalable. So that you can leave with enough knowledge to apply this, if needed. Or just to plan ahead so that your future projects don't preclude taking these steps when needed.

You can listen this new episode in one of two ways - either via the in-page player or by just downloading the mp3 directly and listening to it in your audio player of choice.

New on the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a tutorial (written up by Cesar Rodas) about using MongoDB (a NoSQL database) in PHP applications.

Nowadays there is a new kind of databases that is getting very popular, specially for Web development, including the PHP world, which are the NoSQL databases. This article focus specifically on MongoDB, despite there are several other NoSQL database implementations.

While he starts you from the beginning on the PHP side (with the ) you'll need to already have MongoDB up and running to work with. He shows you how to insert new documents, update ones already in the database, pulling our documents and removing them from the database. He also covers a more real-world application of the database as well as how to store files, work with the map-reduce functionality and auto-sharding abilities.

New on his MSDN blog Bruno Terkaly has started up a series on working with PHP on a cloud-computing platform, in this case he chooses the Azure Windows platform.

This blog entry is about running PHP in the cloud. Why would you want to run PHP in the cloud? We will work with our Azure data storage constructs (Blogs, Queues, Tables).

They use the PHP SDK for Windows Azure to connect to and use the application out in the cloud instance they create to run IIS and FastCGI to run a PHP application. He shows how to install the needed software and how to use the Expression Web software to create a simple site and upload it to the cloud instance.

In this new post to his blog Paul Jones points out a set of slides from a coworker of his (Theo Schlossnagle) based around his book "Scalable Internet Architectures".

This is not strictly PHP, but it is about scalability, and every PHP programmer *ought* to be thinking about this stuff. Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI (where I work as a web architect) has this slide deck posted about Scalable Internet Architectures.

Paul points out some highlights of the slides:

• Slide 7: "Lack of awareness of the other disciplines is bad."
• Slide 29: Know the difference between "premature optimization" and "necessary optimization".
• Slide 59: "Scaling is hard, performance is easier. Extremely high-performance systems tend to be easier to scale, because they don't have to SCALE as much."
• Slide 63: Combine this with slide 59, and you have the reason why you need to know your application responsiveness.

In this new post on the PHP::Impact blog, Federico looks at some examples of directory setups for web apps that can help to make them both scalable and flexible.

Designing a modular and component-based directory structure for your Web applications can seem like an easy task. If your system is small, it may seem logical to go with the simplest design possible, but if there's anything more time consuming and complex than developing a new directory structure design, it's trying to redesign an existing system that wasn't developed with growth in mind.

He breaks it up into a few different topics that can be applied where needed to keep the application in check:

• Consistency
• Scalability and Flexibility
• Single Application
• Multi-application
• Naming Conventions
• Versioning
• Proposed Structure

In a new post today Dhiraj Patra shares some tips on making your PHP applications as scalable as they need to be.

The first part of this article, "Real-World PHP Security", appeared in the April 2004 issue of Linux Journal and covered the subject of secure PHP development. This article takes you, the professional PHP developer, one step further, by providing detailed explanations and reliable source code that illustrate the steps to follow in order to develop successful PHP applications.

He mentions some key issues - like keeping a clean environment and correctly using database connectivity - that can keep your application running smoothly.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode 8 of their ZendCon Sessions series podcast today - Shahar Evron's talk on methods for creating scalable development environments:

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Shahar Evron present "Building Scalable Development Environments".

The standard three methods for listening to the episode apply - subscribe to the feed, download the mp3 or just visit the page and use the built-in player.