You’ve been using the Apache web server forever. You know what it can do, and what it can’t do. It just becomes part of the plumbing, so to speak. But did you know it could do traffic balancing between several servers? Or serve content in a customer’s preferred language, based on their browser settings? Or do complex expression evaluation at request time to determine what content to serve? This is a collection of those techniques which, I hope, will make you say “Oh, I didn’t know Apache could do that!” –by Rich Bowen

Maybe you think you know all about closures. I thought similarly myself when last I wrote for this magazine on “The Truth About Lambdas in PHP” (June 2011). Then PHP 5.4 beta1 happened, completely changing my mind. Closures have undergone a breathtaking transformation. After reading RFC proposals and Internals Mailing List discussions, as well as contacting key contributors to PHP, I propose that we revisit PHP’s anonymous functions and see what makes them so amazing! –by Sharon Lee Levy

Almost every PHP application out there needs to read data from files or write data to files – or things that look like files but are not quite files – these unstructured blobs of data are commonly referred to as “streams”. Stream functions allow a scalable, portable and memory efficient way to handle data, and pretty much any PHP developer out there knows how to read data from or write data to a steam. The best part is that you don’t have to be an extension author in order to provide access to any data source as if it was just a regular file. PHP’s userspace streams API allows you do to exactly that, and this article will show you how. –by Shahar Evron

Out with the old, and in with the new. From new and shiny goodies like WebSockets in HTML5 over server-side JavaScript and the inevitable Node.js to some implementations and experiments in PHP; we will try to cover them all here. –by Jonas Mariën

The end of the year is a great time to reflect on the past year, evaluate what you have learned, and remember to thanks those that helped you along. –by Stefan Koopmanschap

For this month’s Bug Zapper column, I wanted to pick a critical or blocker issue. To my surprise, many of those issues are about AMF, which means they involve some flavor of Flash, be it classic Flash or Flex. While I enjoy learning new concepts, this is just too much. Not only do I almost consider Flash a blocker issue by itself (like some people call Windows a virus), I would have to brush up on my Flash knowledge, buy Flex Builder or Flash, and then learn the Zend Framework AMF component. Although this would be fun, I do not have that much time on my hands, so I’ll just pick another “critical” issue, one about an old friend: ”Zend_Db_Table”. –by Bart McLeod

Just like at the airport, if your entrance code is just going through the motions, you may not be secure at all. –by Arne Blankerts

It’s time to stop boxing ourselves into one language or tool. Absolutism isn’t the answer. –by Marco Tabini

Cleaning up and remembering to say thank you. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long