New on the Blue Parabola blog today, there's an article from Keith Casey trying to set the record straight on some recent benchmarks put together by Zend and Acquia showing the performance of Drupal.

While I have not attempted to duplicate or validate any of their individual numbers or conclusion as a whole, I have been a Drupal user for well over five years and have launched 30+ sites on it.

With this experience to back him up, he points out a few things about the report that either needed work or were misleading in their results. This includes a limitation on the web server configurations they covered, the statistics on Windows performance (might turn people off to using it on this platform) and the emphasis being put in some of the wrong places - optimizing PHP versus Drupal.

He recommends that, like all studies and whitepapers like this, you take the results as only guidelines and examples, not as absolute facts. There's always going to be differences in hardware, software and configuration so what gave the big numbers and results for them might not work for you.

As Developer.com mentions in a new article, there's a new video tutorial posted over on Internet.com about using PHP and JSON to pass around data in your applications.

Got seven minutes to learn how you can harness the power of PHP, JavaScript and JSON in a powerful AJAX-driven web application? This Internet.com Video tutorial shows you all you need to know to pass data between the client and server using JSON data format.

The video explains a bit about JSON+PHP and shows you how to send a simple message (book-related data) to the server and how to handle the response with a little help from jQuery's Ajax functions.

In this interview, recorded at CFinNC 2009, Dan Wilson speaks with ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman on the rebirth of the ColdFusion platform. Evolving from its early days as a C++ product, to becoming a fully Java-based implementation for the enterprise, ColdFusion today commands a growing community of 800,000 developers. List...

Abhinav Singh has a new post to his blog that looks at using a powerful tool, memcached, with PHP to create a simple queue system that could be reused just about anywhere.

Memcached is a scalable caching solution developed by Danga interactive. One can do a lot of cool things using memcached including spam control, online-offline detection of users, building scalable web services. In this post, I will demonstrate and explain how to implement fast scalable queues in PHP.

He starts with an overview of what the queue will let you do - save data into the queue with a unique identifier and pull it back out based on the key requested (and is removed from the queue). The code sets up the connection to the memcached server and gives you methods to check if the queue is empty and to push and pull records in and out. A bit of sample code illustrates how to put it to use.

In another of his "Solar Shorts" Richard Thomas talks about the road to Solar 1.0 as broken down into three points that will lead up to the framework's 1.0 release.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

Latest PEAR Releases:

• PEAR_PackageFileManager_Plugins 1.0.1
• PEAR_PackageFileManager2 1.0.1
• VersionControl_Git 0.4.2
• Auth_SASL 1.0.4

SAP CEO Suddenly Resigns   Leo Apotheker just announced he is stepping down as the CEO of SAP.  The SAP executive board has already appointed Co-CEOs to replace him: Bill McDermott, head of field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development.  There's no word on the reason behind the resignation, but the move does come about a week after SAP announced a 12 percent non-GAAP...

The position of braces in PHP code can be set up in the PHP formatting setting, category Braces(select item Braces in the Category combo box). It's possible to set up separately position of the brace after class declaration, function or method declaration and for other statements.

There are three values -  Same Line, New Line and Preserve Existing  that can be set to. The default value is Same Line.

Oracle's Eclipse Package Gets an Upgrade   Oracles's set of free Eclipse plugins for Java EE development on Oracle Fusion Middleware just got a new version upgrade.  Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g includes a new AppXRay feature that helps visualize complex dependencies in an application.  The release also includes WYSIWIG Web page editing, Service Component Architecture support,...

As mentioned in this new post by Alexander Veremyev to the Zend Developer Zone, the first Russian Zend Framework conference has been announced - ZFConf 2010.

I am happy to announce the 1st Russian Zend Framework Conference (ZFConf 2010) which will take place in Saint-Petersburg, Russia at the end of March. An initial list of topics has been decided and the conference is open for registration. I am glad to participate in the event along with other speakers, some of which are acknowledged specialists and have a wide experience in using Zend Framework. The official language of the conference is Russian.

Topics include Zend_Search_Lucene, message queues, internationalization and a look at what Zend Framework 2.0 has to offer.

You can get more details on the conference from their main website or find out more of the specifics of registering. (Note: as of the time of this post, most of their site hasn't been translated to English, save the topics list.)

In a recent interview posted on the O'Reilly Radar site, Msc Slocum talks with Kevin Tatroe about what Facebook's HipHop means for business.

Facebook's PHP overhaul, HipHop, reportedly cut CPU usage on the company's servers by around 50 percent. You don't have to be a programmer to understand that kind of result. [...] asked Kevin Tatroe, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming PHP, to weigh in on HipHop's functionality and its broader applications.

Mac starts with some basic questions - how will it help developers, how will it help businesses - and then asks for some clarification as to what the project really is and how difficult Kevin thinks it will be for companies to adopt.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post from Craig Buckler showing how to split up your WordPress content into two or more columns quickly and easily.

WordPress is a great CMS, but implementing some features within your theme can require a little lateral thinking. The content for your page or post is usually output by the theme code using a single function call. But what if you need to split the content into two or more blocks? That might be necessary if your theme requires multiple columns or sections on the page.

There's a built in call WordPress includes, "get_the_content", that returns the content rather than just echoing it out. With this handy function giving you just the content, you're free to split up the content however you want - on certain tags or as they suggest, using the "more..." tag and a few modifications to a few other scripts to split it out into DIV blocks.

Just a quick note today from the CodeIgniter project - if you've been using their Subversion server to pull your latest copies of the framework down, they've made a change.

Our Subversion repositories have moved. Please update your repositories or check out new ones from the new location: http://svn.ellislab.com/CodeIgniter/trunk

The normal downloads (and archive files) are still available on the CodeIgniter download page.

This article is a quick introduction to the Migrations plugin, open sourced a few weeks ago by our company. You will see how simple it is to use the plugin and what you could do with it. I hope this article will show you the benefits of using migrations in your CakePHP applications and make you give it a try right after the reading! Here is a one-sentence description of the plugin: the Migrati...

Based on the comments under this post the options for placing braces were changed. So this post is not relevant anymore and new information you can find here.

When you select PHP language in the formatting setting then in Category combo box you can select category Braces. The panel for this category contains only one combo box, where you can define the position of braces. There are three values -  Same Line, New Line and Preserve Existing. The default value is Same Line. See the picture.

 I'm not sure whether this one option is sufficient. Does someone have a requirement to offer more options for the braces? For example the Java formatting has options that allow to set different behavior for class declaration, methods declaration and other cases. Also it allows to set that  braces are indented on the new line.

Doctrine allows you to set up relationships to link data in various tables together. Unfortunately, those aren't always in the order they need to be in. In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes shows you how to sort these relationship results just by adding a simple line to your request.

I started digging around via search engine. Took me about an hour to find the solution. First, it took me half the time to dive deep enough to find out WHERE I can define the default sort order. Surprisingly, it was in an area that made total sense but I could not find before.

You can see an example of it in the "hasMany" call in his code snippet - the addition of the "orderBy" option and the value showing the sorting order. Here's the StackOverflow page that gave him the answer he needed.

Recently a contribution was made to combine Ingres with PHP to help users get started developing PHP applications. The project is called EasyIngres and was created by Cedric Pasquotti, a PHP developer based in France .

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney looks at creating reusable plugins for the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework. This is a follow-up from his previous article introducing Zend_Application.

What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course! All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.

His example shows a plugin that can set the doctype of the view you're using and set the default page title and the separator. He mentions things like the framework's coding/naming standards, dependency tracking, setting up the configuration and, finally, doing the two actions laid out at the start. A few simple lines added to the application.ini file and you're all set to start using the new plugin.

Raphael Stolt has a new post to his blog today looking at how you can use the Zend_Service_Twitter component of the Zend Framework to work with the lists on Twitter.

While debating some use cases for an event registration application I stumbled upon an interesting feature, which adds participants automatically to a Twitter list upon registration. [...] This post will show how this feature can be implemented by utilizing the Zend_Service_Twitter component, and how it then can be used in a Zend Framework based application.

The Zend_Service_Twitter component makes it simple to interact with Twitter's API and calling the lists part of the API is a snap. His script first checks to see if a list exists, creates it if it doesn't and will add a user to it when they're registering. The class also includes the usual delete and modify functionality for both the users in the list and the lists themselves.

He finishes with a simple form that uses his interface class to take in the person's twitter username and send it off to the service.

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