PHP Programming Services

The Zend Engine

webmaster0ph — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:25:46 +0000

When PHP 3 was written, an entirely new parser was created from the ground up. The introduction of PHP 4 represented a similar revolution in the code base. Zend is a scripting engine that sits below the PHP-specific modules. It was optimized to ensure massively improved performance and extensibility.

PHP 5 brings new fundamental improvements with the introduction of the Zend Engine 2. We have already touched on the great change ushered in by ZE2. The engine provides significantly enhanced support for object-oriented programming. For the first time, objects and object-oriented design lie at the heart of PHP, making it an even more suitable platform for large enterprise applications.

More information on The Zend Engine can be found at http://www.mymetadesign.com.

Why Choose PHP?

webmaster0ph — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:24:02 +0000

There are some compelling reasons to work with PHP. For many projects, you will find that the production process is significantly faster than you might expect if you are used to working with other scripting languages. At Corrosive we work with both PHP and Java. We choose PHP when we want to see results quickly without sacrificing stability. As an open-source product, PHP is well supported by a talented production team and a committed user community. Furthermore, PHP can be run on all the major operating systems and with most servers.

Speed of Development
Because PHP allows you to separate HTML code from scripted elements, you will notice a significant decrease in development time on many projects. In many instances, you will be able to separate the coding stage of a project from the design and build stages. Not only can this make life easier for you as a programmer, but it also can remove obstacles that stand in the way of effective and flexible design.

PHP Is Open Source
To many people, open source simply means free, which is, of course, a benefit in itself.

Well-maintained open-source projects offer users additional benefits, though. You benefit from an accessible and committed community that offers a wealth of experience in the subject. Chances are that any problem you encounter in your coding can be answered swiftly and easily with a little research. If that fails, a question sent to a mailing list can yield an intelligent, authoritative response.

You also can be sure that bugs will be addressed as they are found, and that new features will be made available as the need is defined. You will not have to wait for the next commercial release before taking advantage of improvements.

There is no vested interest in a particular server product or operating system. You are free to make choices that suit your needs or those of your clients, secure that your code will run whatever you decide.

Performance
Because of the powerful Zend engine, PHP shows solid performance compared with other server scripting languages, such as ASP, Perl, and Java Servlets, in benchmark tests. To further improve performance, you can acquire a caching tool (Zend Accelerator) from http://www.zend.com/; it stores compiled code in memory, eliminating the overhead of parsing and interpreting source files for every request.

Portability
PHP is designed to run on many operating systems and to cooperate with many servers and databases. You can build for a Unix environment and shift your work to NT without a problem. You can test a project with Personal Web Server and install it on a Unix system running on PHP as an Apache module.

More information on PHP advantages can be found at http://www.mymetadesign.com.

What’s New in PHP 5?

webmaster0ph — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:22:04 +0000

PHP 5 introduces numerous new features that will make the programmer’s life more interesting. Let’s take a quick look at some of them. If they don’t make sense to you now, don’t worry, we cover all these features in detail in this book:

PHP has new integrated for support for XML. The various functions and classes provided to handle XML in different ways all now use the same underlying library (libxml2). This should make XML features more stable and interoperable.

The SQLite SQL library is now bundled with PHP, together with all the functions you need to work with it.

PHP now supports private and protected methods and properties in classes.

PHP supports class constants.

Objects passed to functions and methods are now passed by reference. That is, a reference to an object is passed around your script rather than copies of objects. This significantly reduces the likelihood of bugs in object-oriented code.

PHP supports static methods and properties, making more advanced object-oriented designs possible.

Methods can now be declared to require particular object types.

The comparison operator (===) now checks that two references point to the same object. Previously, it was hard to test objects in this way.

PHP now supports abstract classes and interfaces.

Many of these improvements are due to some fundamental changes under the hood.

More information on PHP5 Features can be found at http://www.mymetadesign.com.

What Need Does PHP Fulfill?

webmaster0ph — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:20:16 +0000

There have been scripting solutions for as long as there has been a World Wide Web. As the need to create sites with dynamic content has grown in recent years, so has the pressure to create robust environments quickly and efficiently. Although C can be a great solution for creating fast server tools, it is also hard to work with and can easily produce security holes if not carefully deployed. Perl, a language originally developed for text processing naturally met the demand for dynamic Web environments. Much easier to deploy safely than C, its slower performance has always been more than balanced by the comparatively fast development cycle it offers. Even more useful has been the increasing availability of a large number of stable code libraries for Perl.

So where does PHP fit in? PHP was written especially for the Web. Many of the issues and problems faced by Web programmers are addressed within the language itself. Whereas a Perl programmer must use an external library or write code to acquire data submitted by the user of a Web page, PHP makes this data automatically available. Whereas a Perl programmer must install modules to enable her to write database-driven environments, PHP bundles a powerful SQL database library and provides built-in support for a whole range of third-party databases. In short, because PHP has been created for Web programmers, it has a set of functions for almost any typical problem you might encounter, from managing user sessions to handling XML documents.

So, do we have to pay for this ease of use with even slower performance? Not at all. PHP is designed to run as a module with many server applications, which means that there are none of the start-up overheads associated with CGI scripts. The fact that many typical tasks are handled by PHP means that developers are freed from reliance on utility libraries that can slow things down.

It is not the case that PHP does not provide libraries, though. Perl has the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), and PHP has the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR)—its own repository of powerful packages that extend PHP’s power.

More information on PHP use and applications can be found at http://www.mymetadesign.com.

What is PHP?

webmaster0ph — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:15:14 +0000

PHP is a language that has outgrown its name. It was originally conceived as a set of macros to help coders maintain personal home pages, and its name grew from its purpose. Since then, PHP’s capabilities have been extended, taking it beyond a set of utilities to a full-featured programming language, capable of managing huge database-driven online environments.

As PHP’s capabilities have grown, so too has its popularity. According to NetCraft (http://www.netcraft.com), PHP was running on more than 1 million hosts in November 1999. As of September 2001, that figure had already risen to over 6 million hosts, and by October 2003 PHP was reportedly installed on almost 14 million hosts. According to SecuritySpace.com, PHP is the most popular Apache module available, beating mod_ssl, Perl, and FrontPage.

PHP is officially known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server-side scripting language often written in an HTML context. Unlike an ordinary HTML page, a PHP script is not sent directly to a client by the server; instead, it is parsed by the PHP engine. HTML elements in the script are left alone, but PHP code is interpreted and executed. PHP code in a script can query databases, create images, read and write files, talk to remote servers—the possibilities are endless. The output from PHP code is combined with the HTML in the script and the result sent to the user.

PHP is also installed as a command-line application, making it an excellent tool for scripting on a server. Many system administrators now use PHP for the sort of automation that has been traditionally handled by Perl or shell scripting.

More information on What is PHP? can be found at http://www.mymetadesign.com.