Chris Jones has a new post to his Oracle blog today talking about the new "opcode" opcode caching that's going to be built into future PHP versions This is the implementation of the Zend Optimizer+ opcode caching in a native language interface. The latest PHP 5.5 snapshots have it included.

The new "opcache" can be seen as substitute for the venerable APC cache, the maintenance of which had become an issue. Note: although opcache is now readily available, there is currently nothing preventing you from using any available (working!) opcode cache in PHP 5.5.

He gives you a quick guide to getting this new opcode caching enabled and compiled into a shiny new download of the PHP 5.5.x branch. You'll need a special command line flag on the compile and to update your php.ini to load the needed shares module. You can also use it if you're on PHP 5.2 or higher either by compiling this source or using this PECL extension.

On the "System Architect" site there's a recent post showing you how to integrate PHP and Solr, the searching tool from the Apache project.

So why do you need a search engine, is database not enough? If you create a small website it might not matter. With medium or big size applications it's often wiser to go for a search engine. Saying that, even a small websites can benefit from Solr if you desire a high level of relevance in search results.

Their example involves an ecommerce website and a search for a term (iPhones) and how difficult it could be to match against the possible multiple variations on the models. Solr makes this kind of searching easier. He shows you how to get a Solr instance all set up and configured as well as the PHP PECL extension from here. A sample PHP script is also included showing connecting to Solr, inserting a new document and searching for a simple query of "hello".

The latest issue of the Web and PHP Magazine has been published - issue #12, "Don't get in a PECL". This latest issue includes articles like:

• "The Power of PECL" by Simon Holywell
• "Be 'ready' if you want to be done!" by Steffan Surdek
• "All Data is Relational" by Cory Isaacson
• "Fixing PHP Production Problems with APM" by Dan Delany and Chris Kelly
• "Trust" by Sebastian Bergmann

You can download your copy for free from their site and catch up on back issues.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post today showing you how to install XHGui to help with profiling your application for performance and processing issues.

If you're not familiar with XHGui it's a fabulously easy and friendly way to profile your application; to understand which method calls in a page take the time and how many times they are made, so you can improve the performance of your application. All these instructions are for my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.10 system, hopefully they will work for you or you'll be able to adapt them as appropriate.

She lists the dependencies you'll need to have installed before you can get XHGui working correctly including a MongoDB instance and the PECL xhprof extension. With those all set to go, you can go grab the latest XHGui from github and drop it into place.

Lukas Smith has a new post today about what he sees as an important part of PHP (or really most open source projects) - a predictable release cycle. It centers around the recent proposal to introduce the Zend Optimizer+ into the core and how it seems to be causing a delay with 5.5 (maybe up to 2 months).

What troubles me though is that its being proposed very late in the game for PHP 5.5, therefore causing a likely delay of 5.5 of at least about 2 months in the best case scenario if it were included. The other option of including it in 5.6 does not seem to be as popular at this point. This saddens me quite a bit since I believe that predictable release cycles would carry several advantages

He points out some things that come along with having predicability around the software releases like developers knowing when/if their changes will make it into the next release. It also makes it easier for end users to plan their releases of their own software, knowing when they'll be getting a feature. In this particular case, though, he doesn't quite understand the delay as the Zend Optimizer+ isn't a change to core, it's an addition:

What is even stranger for this case is that we are just talking about an extension here. Its not a language feature, there is no engine level integration. So even if its not added to core, people can easily get Optimizer+ via PECL. So in this case we are not talking about people having to wait another 10-11 months. Don't get me wrong I think getting an opcode cache into core is awesome, but the reality is that shared host users will probably still not have access to it [...] and the rest can still get it, albeit with a bit more effort.

Lorna Mitchell has shared some advice about correcting an issue with PHP and Gearman after she did an upgrade via PECL.

I upgraded PHP and related pecl modules on my development machine today, and ran into a problem with Gearman. Actually I ran into more than one! Firstly the challenge of getting the newest pecl version working with a gearman version. Then an error where my existing PHP application couldn't connect to gearman after upgrade.

Running on Ubuntu, she found this tutorial helpful in getting Gearman back into a working state and installed (version 1.1.1). The "unable to connect" error turned out to be a change in how the Gearman connection needed to be made - the addition of a port to the connection string made things work again.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a quick tutorial showing you how to use SSH and SFTP from inside your PHP applications (requiring the ssh2 package).

In today's world with so many third-party integrations and content-sharing, it's important to understand and make use of protocols like SCP and SFTP. PHP's SSH2 extension, a wrapper for libssh2 which implements the SSH2 protocol, provides several functions you can use to securely transfer files.

Sample code is included showing how to make a SSH request to a remote server, define the key files to use and execute a remote command (like scp). They also mention the use of wrapper functions like mkdir that also work with SSH/SFTP connections. The post finishes up with an example class or two you can use to wrap your connection handling and make it a bit more OOP-friendly.

Johannes Schlüter has a recent post highlighting an interesting PHP extension that can connect memcache with your MySQL server via PHP, the PECL mysqlnd_memcache extension.

Now this blog entry is tagged a s PHP. Hs is that coming into play? - Well, on the one side we have this fast memcache interface, which allows to access almost arbitrarry data from the database. On the other side we have our PHP mysqlnd plugin interface where we can add special features, like query caching or load balancing, transparently to any PHP application. Why not combine those two things? - Good question. That's what we have done in the PECL mysqlnd_memcache PHP extension.

He includes some sample PHP code showing it in action - two examples: one using the "mysqlnd_memcache_set" method to set a memcache server on the MySQL connection and another showing two queries and how they're handled behind the scenes by this driver plugin.

Rob Allen has posted some notes to his site helping you get PHP set up on OSX Lion (10.8) successfully.

With OS X 10.8, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with Xdebug, PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.8.

He's broken it up into a few sections including the MySQL setup, Apache configuration , updating the main php.ini and setting up PHPUnit ("and friends") for your testing. He also includes setup instructions for the mcrypt and the PECL OAuth extensions.

Anthony Ferrara has shared some thoughts in his latest post about some of the PHP frameworks that have come up lately - ones based in PECL extensions, not in userland code.

In recent months, a number of new frameworks have cropped up for PHP as PECL extensions (Including YAF and PhalconPHP). They promise to provide huge performance gains and lower resource usage for PHP applications. On the surface, they appear to be incredible tools for improving development. But they aren't all they are cracked up to be. In fact, I would argue that they are actually not necessary at all.

He breaks the arguments down into two sections - what you gain by having the framework based in an extension (like performance) and some of the things you give up (like readability, portability and maintainability).

My argument here would be that if you have a site where you can measure meaningful money savings by putting the framework into C (with taking the additional maintenance costs into account), you likely shouldn't be using a framework anyway.