The PHP Podcast (from Zend) has posted its second episode - Episode #2, an interview with Adam Culp who recently joined the team at Zend and is a organizer for the South Florida PHP User Group.

In this episode we talk to Adam Culp on his very first day as a Zend employee. We talk about PHP community and Adam's decision to move from the realm of independent consultant to Zender! Adam is the organizer of SunshinePHP, PHP Guru and joining the Zend Professional Services Team.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed of you want this and future episodes pulled automatically.

On 7PHP.com there's a new post that interviews a PHP community member, Eric Hogue, about his experience with the Zend Certified Engineer exam.

This is the 3rd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

He starts off with some general questions to Eric about the exam and its structure and how he prepared himself for it. He mentions some of the resources he used to study and what kind of topics to pay attention to. There's also a few quotes included at the end giving another perspective on the exam (specifically, some frustrations).

The first episode of a new PHP-related podcast, the "PHP Podcast" produced by Zend, has been released. This first episode, hosted by Joe Stagner features a well-known PHPer, Cal Evans.

Cal Evans has been referred to as "The Ubiquitous Face of the PHP Community". That's made Cal an obvious choice for the first guest on the PHPPodcast. In this episode we chat about the evolving face of the PHP community.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Chris Jones has a new post to his Oracle blog today talking about the new "opcode" opcode caching that's going to be built into future PHP versions This is the implementation of the Zend Optimizer+ opcode caching in a native language interface. The latest PHP 5.5 snapshots have it included.

The new "opcache" can be seen as substitute for the venerable APC cache, the maintenance of which had become an issue. Note: although opcache is now readily available, there is currently nothing preventing you from using any available (working!) opcode cache in PHP 5.5.

He gives you a quick guide to getting this new opcode caching enabled and compiled into a shiny new download of the PHP 5.5.x branch. You'll need a special command line flag on the compile and to update your php.ini to load the needed shares module. You can also use it if you're on PHP 5.2 or higher either by compiling this source or using this PECL extension.

On PHPMaster.com Timothy Boronczyk has written up a tutorial about using the Slim microframework as a sort of "middleware" in your application - a wrapper around other functionality with an easier to use interface.

Slim is a microframework that offers routing capabilities for easily creating small PHP applications. But an interesting, and powerful, feature is its concept of Middleware. [...] I've found middleware to be an eloquent solution for implementing various filter-like services in a Slim app, such as authentication and caching. In this article I'll explain how middleware works and share with you a simple cache example that highlights how you can implement your own custom middleware.

He talks about what "middleware" is (complete with illustration) and how Slim can be used as a layer in the middleware stack. His example is a caching layer, based on Slim, that takes a request, checks the cache for it and returns it if it exists. If not, it saves the content to a database. He also includes code examples of how to use the "add" method to introduce your middleware libraries into the Slim application.

If you'd like more examples, the Slim project has several middleware examples provided in their "extras" github repository.

In this new post to his site Kevin Schroeder thinks out loud and wonders if an idea of his is "a dumb idea" to be included into the PHP core - engine state caching.

I was consulting and I would see significant server resources consumed by bootstrapping the apps. Loading config files, loading dependent classes, setting up dependencies, initializing ACL's, and the list goes on and on. One of the ways to negate the effect would be to cache a bootstrap object and then pull that object from the cache at the start of the request. However, the problem is that unserialization can actually end up taking more time than the bootstrap process itself.

He wonders if, after the initial bootstrapping happened, a method could be called (his example is "init_engine_state") that would cache the Zend Engine's current state and pass that to a callback function. This would cache everything - objects, variables, classes, etc - all pre-interpreted into memory and make them easy to reuse on future executions. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments of the post.

7PHP.com has posted a new article where they asked Lorna Mitchell for some of her advice for those wanting to take the Zend Certified Engineer exam, including what the test is like and how you can prepare effectively.

This is the 2nd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

They start with a little background on her and her experience with PHP and get quickly into the questions about the exam. Topics include things like:

• What the test is about and hopes to achieve
• Some things you can do to prepare
• A recommendation to make the most of your time exploring topics you might be weak in
• Whether or not the ZCE training classes help in the learning process

You can read the rest of the interview here.

On 7PHP.com today there's a new interview posted, a different kind of one from their usual "community spotlight" series. In this new article they talk with Michelangelo van Dam about the Zend Certified Engineer test and any advice he can offer to those wanting to take it.

This is the 1st set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is.

There's a long list of questions in the interview covering a wide range of things about the test everything from what its about out to some of Michelangelo's own opinions about the tests:

• Can you briefly give us an idea of what ZC is about, what it tries to achieve?
• Can you give us an idea of what need to be studied and what kind of stuffs we should expect..etc
• Parts of the modules that you think is more complex and one should pay special attention to?
• What TWO questions can you remember that you can share with us
• Do you recommend PHP guys to get certified?

Check out the answers to these and more questions in the full interview.

James Fuller has posted a guide to scaling your web application using the nginx web server, memcached, PHP-FPM and APC caching.

We sell an educational product that serves a predictable 15,000 requests per minute for 10+ hours/day, every day. Instead of Apache, we use nginx with PHP-FPM to handle this traffic. This is becoming a very popular setup for many companies with non-trivial traffic, but I have also found success with it in my small 256MB Ram VPS. For various reasons, nginx does a better job with memory and concurrent connection handling than Apache. In this post, I want to talk about some of the reasons you might want to go with this setup.

He talks about some of the efficiency gains that memcache and nginx can give you pretty easily and some of the common uses for nginx, including using it as a reverse proxy. He talks some about Apache's typical request handling and shows the difference between that and how nginx does its "never block, finish fast" handling. He fits in the other pieces - PHP-FPM, memcached and APC - showing how each of them offers their own types of performance gains for different areas of the application.

Michael Nitschinger has written up a new post comparing a few different methods for serializing or translating objects to store them in a cache. In it, he compares the PHP serializer, the igbinary extension and translation to JSON.

Storing PHP objects (or simpler data types like arrays) in caches always requires some kind of transformation. You need a way of encoding/decoding data so that it can be stored and loaded properly. In most languages, this process is known as object serialization. PHP provides a mechanism for this out of the box, but in this article we'll also look at igbinary as a drop-in replacement for the default serializer. We also compare the results to object transcoding based on JSON, which is not really an object serialization mechanism but commonly used as a data chache structure which has its own benefits and drawbacks.

He goes through each of the three technologies and includes a snippet of code showing how they'd work in object translation. He also talks about things like the size of the result and the performance of each when the results are looped over. Based on the results of some of his "microbenchmarking" of each of the methods, igbinary came out on top, even faster than PHP's own serialize/unserialize.