In previous article I measured the performance of HipHop for PHP by performing some tests downloaded from the shootout.alioth.debian.org website. Unfortunately the test list was incomplete. Only six tests were selected to avoid potential incompatibility issues with the HipHop compiler.

In this new post he provides the results for two more tests: regex-dna and k-nucleotide. He outlines the testing platform and shares the results of testing some pretty basic scripts. His results were interesting and found that some operations the HipHop compiler actually slowed down.

Google Analytics allows you to collect pretty robust data about how users move through your e-commerce site. Here's how to make it work with Zen Cart, an open source shopping cart.

You'll need to already have a Google Analytics account set up for the application, a Zen Cart instance installed and have at least a passing knowledge with using PHP and MySQL. There's two steps to the process - a creation of a custom functions file (code provided) and a modification to two other files (the checkout success page and global footer) to send additional information to the Analytics service.

Persistent Connections have been a mixed bag. They can give you a significant performance boost by caching (pooling) connections although MySQL is already comparatively fast at establishing connections. However,connections are stored "as-is" in the cache. They are not "cleaned up".

The ext/mysqli driver takes care of this and a few other problems surrounding the persistent connections by cleaning up things like rolling back active transactions, unlocking tables, closing prepared statements and closing handlers. The trick is in a call to the C-API function mysql_change_user() (= COM_CHANGE_USER).

You know when there's something out there that you know you will like, but for whatever reason you don't check it out right away. Like the TV show Arrested Development or fleece. That was me with the CakePHP DebugKit. For those even more out of the loop then me, the DebugKit is a CakePHP plugin that adds a bunch of information panels to your app.

The DebugKit gives you some of the vital stats of your CakePHP application at your fingertips. You can grab session information, check out the last request information, get a log of SQL statements, get the loading times of parts of the page, view a log file you can add to and see how much memory the current page of the site is using.

• This was the last month of PHP 4 dominance
• PHP 5 tops PHP market share with 47.50% usage
• PHP 4.4.9's usage is moving even lower

The full stats (including graphs) can be found here and the evolution stats are here.

Following up on my previous post about the differences between the mbstring and iconv international characters libraries (which resulted in a tentative conclusion that nobody knew anything about those differences), and particularly the comments by Nicola, we have combined forces (mostly efforts from Nicola, actually) to provide you with a little benchmarking, if that can help you decide.

His code for the test script is included (for you to gather your own results) and a full listing of his results comparing the effects of possible caching, running up to ten executions. You can download the text file that he ran the script on here.

Statistics and reports analyze the change over time of any kind of phenomena. [...] For the software industry, statistics and reports provide both an ongoing challenge and an ongoing market. At present, programming languages such as PHP and Java come with built-in packages for developing applications around statistical problems.

They use two PEAR packages for the statistics - Text_Statistics and XML_Statistics to pull in different kinds of data and extract results from it. The next step is to make a meaningful report out of these numbers - that's where PHPReports comes in. It's a simple tool that makes simple reports for you that can then be styled with CSS however you'd like.

Instead of instantiating PHPUnit from phing, I use the command line interface to call PHPUnit. This decouples phing and PHPUnit, which should cause less problems with version updates in the future. To configure PHPUnit, phing creates a temporary XML configuration file which is deleted after PHPUnit has finished.

The source is included in the post - it manually builds the XML file needed for phing to do its job.

I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world. The result is online here.

He also asks readers how they see PHP adoption going in their companies: "Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region."

PHP adoption statistics for December 2007 are released. Here are the monthly highlights:

• PHP 5 is now running on 27.8% of the servers
• PHP 5.2 usage will pass PHP 4.3 by April
• PHP 5.2.5 is 8.7% of the PHP 5 market

You can get more information on this month's stats over on the Nexen.net website - the evolution stats and the full stats for December 2007.