Adriaan de Groot, vice president of KDE e.V., wrote a short essay on Target Platforms for KDE. His divisions of four types of target platforms is instructive; the two major axes are free/non-free and Unix-like/other. “Unix-like” is an awfully big…

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In a new article on DevShed, the spotlight is on putting Apache “in jail” with chroot, but they also include a section on setting up PHP to work inside it.

In this conclusion to a six-part series on Apache configuration and installation, you will learn how to use chroot to put Apache in jail, how to prepare PHP to work in jail, and more.

The article is an excerpt from the O’Reilly book “Apache Security” and shows how to get PHP to cooperate by installing it normally and then setting up some shared libraries to be used in the jail. They note one common problem – an issue with PHP accessing sendmail – that can be solved easily with a change to php.ini for the setup.

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This new post from Jon Lebensold (on the KillerPHP blog) introduces you to a handy feature of the Zend Framework – View Helpers.

In summary, View Helpers are great for encapsulating forms, grids and other functionality that could eventually be bound to a different data source or even be pushed back to the user through a simple AJAX call.

Example code on how to use them is included showing a sample helper that adds Ajax functionality to a form’s submit and pushes the response values back out into a div on the page.

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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he’s written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.

The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.

He talks about a few different aspects:

• PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc)
• RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving)
• HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)

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According to Tony Bibbs, PHP’s real problem is itself.:

So what do I mean when I say PHP’s problem is PHP itself? [...] One word. Sustainability.

He suggests that, while PHP has made a big splash in the areas it’s hit, it is still tripping over its own feet. PHP, the language, can meet the needs of just about any sort of web development that might come down the line, but when good PHP developers are so hard to find, why should any organization bother with working it into their technology stack?

Comments on the article responds to the “chicken and egg situation” Tony has presented and how things like user groups can help stoke the fires of PHP’s presence in not only the budding web developers but also in the professionals looking to expand their horizons.

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