I have been answering a lot of email requests for how to get started with a Bebo application. Since applications can be written in any language that supports interaction with the Bebo REST API, developers have a lot of choices in how they build their application. The focus of this article will be on the "officially supported language" - PHP.

He defines the parts of the application first (the callback, canvas page, profile box, invitation and news stories). Much like the Facebook API, the Bebo system has you host the application on your own servers and use their developer libraries to interface with their systems. He makes a simple application that has a "story" published to it that shows to each visitor.

He also tosses in a method for knowing a bit more about the user - like if they've just added the application, if they're a normal user or if they've just removed it from their application list.

Xdebug is a PHP extension which helps you to understand, debug and profile PHP. It can help you to find bottlenecks or give you an quick overview what happens in code you aren't familiar with, yet.

The post gives a brief overview of the installation of the extension (building a shared module) and shows how to get started with profiling an application. He talks about the cachegrind tool you can use to parse the results and the kcachegrind app that will make the results a bit more visual.

As a bonus, he also throws in a bit about function tracing - picking out each small bit of functionality in the code (the function/methods) and gathering stats for each.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

In this week's issue, we will have a look at profiling. Profiling is a feature that seems to be similar to trace logging at first sight. Profiling logs, however, are not meant for human readability, and are not meant to visualize the program's control flow, but provide the data for a statistical analysis of the program run.

He includes an example of the profiling log his XDebug setup is generating and gives the settings you'll need to make a log of your own like php.ini settings to start it up and name it/place it where you want it.

He also talks about the method to get something useful out of the profiling logs - using WinCacheGrind or KCacheGrind to get an overview of what's going on "on the inside" of your application.

Ever wondered where your PHP applications spend their time? [...] We wanted to gain performance insights of a newly developed application based on Zend Framework to spot areas worth receiving some fine tuning. We did not want to modify the application for that purpose so I had a look at the options available for PHP.

The resulting combination of XDebug and KCachegrind to grab the stats from the application and create great output images/reports to help make locating the problem a snap.

Our special guest for this episode of the PHP Abstract podcast is Yossi is the product manager for the development tools group at Zend. He is going to talk to us today about using the Zend Browser Toolbars for Debugging and Profiling your applications.

There's two ways to get the new show - download it directly or subscribe to their feed and get the latest ones hand delivered. They've also started a new program to help bring in more community input into the podcast (oh, and they pay too - $75) for making your contribution.

We know from the previous article that the user ID is very important, in that it is used to retrieve various information from the database at various stages of the application. The login form sets this userID when you log in. It is the login system that will be the focus of this second part in a four-part series.

They give s simple screenshot of what the login will look like before getting into how to connect to the database, verify the user's information, logging in the user, registering new ones, and the code to work with the user's profile.