Leveling Up: Databasics with PDO

If you’ve built anything useful or interesting with PHP, and chances are you have, then you’ve probably used a database. PHP makes interacting with databases easy, and PDO makes it even easier. I am always surprised that when I ask at a conference or user group, “How many people use PDO?” the answer is a rather low number. I wanted to write this article in the hopes that it will convert those of you who aren’t using PDO into users. by David Stockton

Introduction to Development with Aerospike

A few issues come to mind when you’re choosing a database system—is it fast? Is it reliable? Is it hard to code against? And further off in the distance, will it scale, or will that transition become a complete nightmare? Aerospike is an open-source key-value store, and it is the fastest database in its category. It uses a shared-nothing architecture in which your data is distributed evenly and replicated across the cluster, with queries running in parallel across all nodes. by Ronen Botzer

How Many CMSs Can You Fit inside a Website?

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Why do we draw neat little boxes around one CMS or another instead of using bits of one system and bits of another? Even though CMSs are supposed to offer modularity and avoid the need for hooking up massive bits of code to each other they only do so within their own walled garden of modules and plugins. What happens if you push this boundary and throw multiple systems at a single HTTP request? by Julian Egelstaff

How GZIP Compression Works

Data compression is an incredible and challenging topic. It can be seen like magic: data compression algorithms take some input data and are able to reduce its size without losing information. And this is exactly what GZIP does. GZIP (which is based in the DEFLATE algorithm) has become the de facto lossless compression method for text data in websites. In this article, we will see how GZIP works under the hood, why some implementations get better compression ratios, or how we can compress and decompress data in PHP. Finally, we will go even further and discuss some ideas to get even better compression ratios using GZIP. Are you in? by Raul Fraile

Introduction to Product Management for Developers

One of the most valuable and underrated skills a developer can master is the ability to think like a product manager. By learning some basic product management skills, developers can improve the quality of their product, open up new career opportunities, and become more well-rounded software engineers. by Joshua Silver

PHP Dependency Injection Part Three

Welcome back to another edition of Education Station, and the final in the three-part series looking at dependency injection and dependency injection containers in PHP. Here in Part Three, we’re going to finish up the series by looking at two final implementations, Symfony\Di and PHP-DI. by Matthew Setter

Community Corner: August 2015

This month we catch up with Matthew Weier O’Phinney. He shares how he got started in the industry, the tech scene in Sioux Falls, a look at the upcoming ZendCon, planning for Zend Framework 3, and what exactly PSR-7 solves. by Joe Devon

finally{}: Outward Appearances of PHP 7

As this article is being printed, PHP 7 is just around the corner. It’s been a very long time coming, and brings with it a lot of questions for us. One that I’d like to explore a bit is how people from outside the PHP community are going to see it. by Eli White