Profiling PHP Applications

If you program PHP professionally, there is little doubtthat, at some point, you will need to improve the performance of anapplication. If you work on a high-traffic site, this might be adaily or weekly endeavor for you; if your projects are mainlyintranet ones, the need may arise less frequently. At some point,though, most applications need to be “retuned” in orderto perform as you want them to. PHP author George Schlossnagleguides you through the ins and outs of profiling PHPapplications.—by George Schlossnagle

Writing PHP Extensions: Managing Arrays

PHP arrays are one of the best inventions since slicedbread—but they are not necessarily easy to deal with whenyou’re writing a PHP extension in C. Join Wez Furlong for anin-depth look at how the Zend Engine makes it easy for you tomanipulate hash tables without having to write a mountain ofspecialized code.—by Wez Furlong

Caching Techniques for the PHP Developer

Caching is an excellent technique for speeding up yourapplication by saving the result of complex operations in memoryfor later usage. As Bruno Pedro shows you in this article, websitescan take advantage of caching on many different levels to attainhigher scalability and performance levels—and PHP offers awide array of caching capabilities.—by Bruno Pedro

Write SMS Applications With PHP and Gnokii

SMS—shorthand for Short Message Service—is thestandard used by cellular phone networks worldwide to allow theircustomers to exchange small text messages using their handsets.Despite its limitations, SMS is very popular with cell phoneusers—and it has rapidly become a widely-used bridge betweenthe Internet and mobile users. Eric Persson shows you how you canbuild your own SMS gateway using nothing more than PHP, anopen-source application called Gnokii and a Nokia phone connectedto your computer.—by Eric Persson

Offline News Management with PHP-GTK

Although many Content Management Systems are entirelyweb-based, there is something to be said for the convenience of anative GUI application that runs on your client computer regardlessof whether you have a connection to the server or not. Until now,the creation of such applications was outside of the abilities ofmany developers, due to the very specialized know-how required andduplication of code involved. Morgan Tocker shows you how canovercome these problems by using that most-often forgotten of PHPextensions—PHP-GTK—to build a fully-functionalGUI-based news manager.—by Morgan Tocker

The Need For Speed

The ever growing popularity of the web is putting acontinually growing stress on the software and hardware used topower the common website. In this article, PHP core developer IliaAlshanetsky helps you combat the growing server loads and increaseyour web serving capacity without resorting to costly hardwareupgrades.—by Ilia Alshanetsky