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.

Despite the release candidates for PHP 5.2.0 marching on, Lukas Smith still has some misgivings about some of the functionality being introduced in the release - specifically about the fatal errors that are going to break a lot of (working) object oriented functionality.

Anyways I just posted the following email to internals in a list attempt to get some of the people with php-dev karma to lift their finger.

In the message, he notes the change he's looking for and a suggestion to get it included before RC6 of the series gets released (which has been released as of this post already).

Sometimes, it's just not enough to sit and try to teach theory about something in programming - it's better to just jump right in and take things as they come. That's what Harry Fuecks thinks, at least in his latest post on the SitePoint PHP Blog - a look at the "Joy of Regular Expressions".

He does go over a bit of the theory and why they are so invaluable, but it's a short section before he gets to the heart of the article - working with regular expressions for:

• positive matching
• matching all instances in a given string
• finding an exact match
• matching the start of a string
• validation of the contents of a string
• checking the length of a string

Scott Johnson has created and posted another in his podcast series today, this time, he looks not at the development side of PHP - the actual code - but at the theory behind its development and best practices.

At the request of a listener to past podcasts, Scott created this one to share some of his experiences and findings along the path of his develoopment. Some of the items covered in the podcast include:

• package and library management
• naming conventions
• the seperation of UI and business logic
• code distribution
• using test harnesses

You can download the MP3 of the podcast directly from here.

Jacob Santos is back again today with this new blog post - his look at the world of PHP compilers and some of his theories (and rants) on the subject.

I know very little of compiler and interpreter theory and have never (yet) created a working implementation of a compiler or interpreter. What you're about to read or (most likely) skip over is a Head-in-Ass post and feel free to flame me on parts where I'm wrong, which will be most places. Do realize that this is one end user's opinion of the matter and any perceived insult upon any author(s) is not intended and please do not take it as such.

Jacob talks about run-time classes, class optimization, what he "really wants" out of a compiler, namespace functionality, a "phpc" extension, and his opinions on the Zend Engine, other web technologies, and the future of PHP.