At work I had the task to implement the synchronization between an online shop and a commodity management system. Data exchange format was XML - one big XML file for all of the products (some thousands with dozens of attributes). Big question: How do I import the file in a way that is most convenient for me as a programmer - and without exceeding the machine's RAM when loading a 1 GiB file?

The newer alternatives both use the same technology (DOM and SimpleXML - with DOM behind it) so he goes more "low tech" than that and opts for the XMLReader extension to pull in the large amounts of data. Available in PHP5, the XMLReader extension, which he combines with an Iterator from the SPL to makes for a simple, quick little parser.

Now, consider the "average" PHP frameworks. They help you handle request data, manage your output, control app flow - essentially, extending PHP's inbuilt functionality. They are, therefore, PHP frameworks on the PHP framework. PHP provides a vast array (pardon the pun) of functionality out of the box. But when you want to do things your way, it gets out of the way, and this is really important when building anything beyond a simple database frontend.

He suggests that PHP is a "half framework" on its own, providing quick an easy methods and functionality to build up applications. He gives an example of Twitter (and really, who isn't picking on them these days) and how it probably could have avoided a lot of the issues it is seeing if it had gone with something a bit more efficient and flexible.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other great opinions from the community.

A useful part of minification is that during the act of compiling your minified source, you can also pull in other JavaScript files and compiled them all into one single source. This has a major advantage that there is only one file to download.

The method runs a file_get_contents on each of the javascript files, and pulls their content into a single PHP variable. This value is then just echoed out after it's passes through this minimizer class.

Kae also offers an alternative to performing this expensive operation each time - caching then checking the md5 hash of the cache to see if it's different than the current version. Example code is included.

PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.

He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.

From Wez:

Wez also mentions one of his personal views on the whole debate, basically saying that even if PHP is the faster/more efficient, some situations might do better with an ASP.NET solution (what's the cost of implementation?).