On the Inviqa techPortal today there's a new post talking about the most recent speaker at the PHP LondonRasmus Lerdorf.

July's PHP London had a particularly notable speaker – Rasmus Lerdorf himself presenting what's new in PHP. So many people wanted to attend that, with limited venue capacity, a live (and recorded) video stream was used for the first time. You can skip straight to seeing the slides and video of the session if you like, or keep reading for my impressions of the evening.

They include a brief overview of what Rasmus talked about including: a brief history and evolution of the language, a few points about PHP 5.4 and then on to the "shiny and new" of PHP 5.5. and the features it introduced. He also added in a bit at the end about two tools that his employer, Etsy, has released to help with more atomic deployments.

In a new post to his blog Abhinav Singh shows you how to create a simple application that uses the memcached atomic increment command to help prevent concurrency issues.

Memcached provide atomic increment and decrement commands to manipulate integer (key,value) pairs. However special care should be taken to ensure application performance and possible race conditions while using memcached. In this blog post, I will first build a facebook style "like" application using atomic increment command of memcached. Also, I will discuss various technical difficulty one would face while ensuring atomicity in this application. Finally, I will demo how to ensure atomicity over a requested process using custom locks in memcached.

Example code is included to show how you can take a normal "store to memcached" example and modify it with the increment method to resolve issues that might come up from one or more scripts trying to get at the same values. He also includes an example of using locking to provide a similar effect.