Anthony Wlodarski makes an important point about what one of your first steps should be when considering a framework for your application - be sure to read the source first. In his case, it was the Zend Framework.

One thing I learned early on with ZF was that the curators and associates in the ZF ecosystem always fall back to the root of "read the code/api/documentation". With good reason too! It is not the volunteers simply shrugging you off but it is for your own good.

He includes an example of the Zend_Validate_File_ImageSize component. By reading the manual you get an idea of the input and output values, but you don't get as much of a sense of how it works unless you take some time to glance through the code.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode of their recording series from last year's Dutch PHP Conference (DPCRadio) - Sebastian Bergmann's talk The Cake is a Lie.

Scaffolding, the meta-programming method of building software applications, promises easier development and a faster time-to-market. But the "code generation bliss" can lead to problems later on, for instance with regard to maintainability and scalability. This sessions takes a skeptical look at frameworks such as CakePHP and symfony.

You can listen in one of three handy ways - either by listening in-page, downloading the (rather large) mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great techPortal content.

In a recent post to the MySQL Performance Blog, there's a pointer to a few resources you can use if you need some sample datasets to run your application against - everything from airline flight information to energy usage data.

Sometimes you just need some data to test and stress things. But randomly generated data is awful - it doesn't have realistic distributions, and it isn't easy to understand whether your results are meaningful and correct. Real or quasi-real data is best. Whether you're looking for a couple of megabytes or many terabytes, the following sources of data might help you benchmark and test under more realistic conditions.

The sample data sets vary from fake movie information to sample site traffic data to the large data sets that Amazon provides (including the Human Genome and US Census data). Some of the comments also link to other sources.

Binpress has announced a new contest they've put together to try to find the best of the best programmers out there. The contest offers over $40,000 USD worth of prizes in three different categories going to the best code submitted to the Binpress site.

Have you been developing custom solutions for the web? pick your best feature, module or UI component that can be packaged and re-used and publish it on Binpress. Binpress is a marketplace for source-code, where developers can sell and buy source code from each other. We are looking for high-quality code from professional developers.

If you're interested, check out the submission guidelines and or just jump in and join the contest with your own submission. The grand prize winner will receive a $17,000 USD award, second and third will receive $13,000 USD and the winners of the "best submission per language" awards will all receive $10,000 USD.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post that talks about source code compilers and a few of the popular PHP compilers to help you optimize your code.

Several PHP compilers existed since many years ago, but the fact that it is actually Facebook releasing their [HipHop] compiler made it a very relevant matter for PHP developers, as Facebook is currently the busiest site in the world that is developed mostly in PHP.

He briefly explains what compilers can do for you (with diagrams) and takes a look at some of the native machine code compilers like Roadsend, PHC Open Source Compiler and Facebook's HipHop. He's also run a few benchmarks to show the performance of the resulting compiled code from each compiler. Some general conclusions are also included like dynamic vs. static PHP, opcode caching and the effects of I/O operations on script execution.

On the PHP 10.0 blog today Stas points out some packages from Zend that are the source versions of the Zend Server platform:

I was asked about PHP going with Zend Server, specifically from which sources it is built - as we don't ship source packages for the builds. Since Zend Server includes PHP build that can have some patches applied from SVN past the release (i.e. if the package has version 5.2.10 it might have some patches that were in SVN 5.2 branch past 5.2.10 tag) - I think it is important that people know what they are going to run if the use Zend Server.

The two packages, php-5.2-source-zend-server and php-5.3-source-zend-server, can be installed just like any other rpm/deb package and will give you full access to the source of the latest Zend Server installation. There's no Changelog included yet, but it should be "Coming Soon" according to Stas.

According to this new post on the PHPClasses.org blog, in the near future India will become the number one source for PHP developers in the world.

The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1. This article presents a reflection about why this growth happened just in the latest years, as well what it means for the PHP world.

They talk about the size of the Indian PHP market and how many developers (certified and uncertified) are out there looking to fill the needs. By their own numbers, the PHPClasses.org has more job openings in India than any other country (with the US coming in second).

As Johannes Schluter mentions in this new blog post, the latest release candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release is now available for download.

5.3 is rather big release including support for namespaces, closures, phar archives, internatioalization support via the new intl extension, improved SQLite support, mysqlnd as backend for the MySQL exensions, impressive performance improvements, ... and tons of other bigger and minor things.

You can grab this latest download over on PHP.net QA site includng both the source for unix-based machines and packages for Windows.

Chris Jones has also posted some thoughts on the new release candidate and, of course, here's the official announcement from PHP.net.

If you're a fan of Planet-PHP (our fellow PHP news source) and have wanted to see how things run behind the scenes, you might want to check out this bit of information from Christian Stocker on where the source has ended up.

After Lukas asked me for the current Planet sources, I realized that I didn't really maintain the sources in the mentioned SVN repository anymore (for various reasons). So I decided to finally move them to GitHub. It makes much more sense there, since the most decent thing to do if you want to set up your own planet is to fork it and git (plus GitHub) makes that painlessly easy. Nevertheless I'm of course still interested in patches.

He warns that the code is a bit on the old side and that the framework its based on has officially been deprecated. If you're still interested, though, you can find (and clone) the application from its GitHub page.

On the NETUTS.com website they've posted a part of their "Dive into PHP" series (part thirteen) cross-posted from the ThemeForest blog (subscribe here). In this edition the vidcast looks at how to handle file uploads in PHP.

By posting short ten minute episodes, beginners can easily digest each lesson, rather than become overwhelmed with more information than their minds are able to consume. [...] In this lesson, you'll learn how to upload files, and how to use regular expressions to ensure that inappropriate file types aren't uploaded to your server.

You can follow along with the vidcast and check out the demo or just skip straight to the source code to get going right away. Links to some of the other video tutorials are also included for things like working with variables, regular expressions and getting started with MySQL.