Page 4 - PHP5/Zend 2.0 - Resources

5.1 Beta 3 is in the wild. Go grab a copy of the Source tarball from your favorite mirror.

Since PHP 5.1 downloads have disappeared without a notice from the downloads page, 5.1 RC's can be found here:

http://downloads.php.net/ilia/

This was posted on Slashdot, but some IBM developers put out a list of recommended PHP reading that has a lot of good resources in it. It's worth checking out.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwor...ry/os-php-read/

---John Holmes...

Does anyone have good places to look for PHP5 classes that would be useful? It seems that finding PHP5 classes is like happening across a needle in a haystack of PHP4 classes...

That's a very good point. I had long since forgot about this thread, and until I found Zend Framework, I had given up on finding anything, I custom wrote pretty much everything. However, especially since Zend Framework went 1.0.0, it's been great. I use it for pretty much everything now.

I think it would be good if we could assemble a list of open source apps. that are written in PHP5.

Keep checking GoPHP5 for a list of PHP5 or soon-to-be PHP5 applications.

nice artcle thanks

I would like to recommend PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide by Larry Ullman on PHP and MySQL. It's very easy to read, and although I've only got around 70 pages through, I am finding it very easy to learn.

If this has already been recommended, I'm just backing up that recommendation

Thanks for the useful links guys

Good tips, although, some of them I didn't quite understand. I wish they would have told why it was bad to do some things...

This one kind of made me laugh...



Hey, Jonathan [Sampson], buddy: didn't you have a friend who observed this law?

My opinion: he emphasizes speed over much anything else. Much of what he mentions only give you small increases in speed.
If speed is really that important to you then you probably shouldn't be using PHP.

I'd be nice if he explained why we shouldn't use magic methods. They are very handy.
I don't like his tip about using static on class functions just to make them faster. Defeats the purpose of OOD.
The one about derived functions being faster than base functions implies that you should override functions in children. What?
You can't put variables in '-quoted strings, yes, but PHP still has to scan each character; there's just a couple fewer characters it has to look for.
PHP does cache scripts to an extent, but it's not as good as (for example) that one PEAR extension.
Using isset($var[offset]) to check string length isn't completely reliable, as ries mentions in his comment.

But many of the things he mentions are good. String functions are faster than regular expressions, use commas with echo instead of concatenation, initialize variables used in conditions in for loops before the loop (or in the initialization part)...
Didn't mention output buffering though.

Yeah he definitely prefers speed over flexibility. You could look at it either way though; you could think "since php is already slow as hell saving a few processor cycles isn't worth it" or you could think "since php is already slow as hell I need to save as many processor cycles as I can".

I already use most of the optimizations that are reasonable and don't negatively affect the flexibility of my code. For example, I use '' by habit when writing strings without variables since it's not any more difficult than typing "" and it's a very minor change if I need to go back and use variables in the string.


I assume it's because the magic methods require PHP to perform an extra step when calling a function (which, if you compare it to incrementing a local variable, is costly lol). Magic methods are not something I am willing to sacrifice for performance. They are far too useful and the extra processor cycles are well worth it.

The article does have a lot of useful advice that's worth keeping in mind. But one of the biggest mistakes a programmer can make is making their code more difficult to maintain so that it runs a few microseconds faster and a lot of the suggestions will result in that happening.