PHP is a flexible, highly extendible and constantly changing language. It can do just about anything you could want or need, and if it can’t now, a small bit of C or C++ can probably get you the missing functionality. Sometimes, though, you are in a situation where you really want to be able to use another language in your PHP code, and here’s how. –by Elizabeth M. Smith

In the first article in this series, we looked at methods that are available to developers for working out a user’s geographical location along with some of the drawbacks of these. This is only the start of the process. Once you have a user’s location, you need to do something interesting with it. This article will look at techniques for deriving data from multiple latitude and longitude points. I’ll then touch briefly on storing and manipulating points in a database before finishing with a look at two sources of local data that are available in North America to incorporate into your application. –by Jeremy Cook

Put Aside Your Misconceptions and Give It a Try
Using Filemaker as a backend for PHP is easier than you may think. It may be no substitute for MySQL and the like when it comes to publishing data online, but it’s a popular application, and it has its place. In this article, I’ll show you how to get started. –by Kim Rowan

It’s popular. Very popular. John Resig released his masterpiece on January 2006, and since then, almost 6,000 of the top 10,000 websites on the internet have come to use jQuery as their de facto standard JavaScript library, making it the most popular JavaScript library amongst developers and designers. It is so popular that it’s becoming the standard library for client-side applications on hybrid mobile devices and in commercial IDEs like Visual Studio. –by Arbi Arzoumani

Buttons are a top offender for remaining unformatted, especially when used in forms. How do our users know which ones to click and when? This month, we’ll explore a variety of quick tips to get your buttons the attention they deserve. –by Laura Smith

Every month, I will focus on a feature taken from other languages like Ruby, Java or Python and see how such features are handled in PHP, or when we can expect such a feature in PHP itself. This month, we are covering bang methods. –by Joshua Thijssen

If we really want to improve the performance and quality of our applications, simple load testing and analysis barely scratch the surface. To really refine our applications, ensuring they have great performance, we have to go deeper. Luckily for us, there’s a tool that does just that – New Relic. –by Matthew Setter

Better doesn’t have to mean beautiful. –by Marco Tabini

In this day and age, everyone needs to expand their toolbox. You never know what will pop up in the next project. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long