Joakim Nygard has come up with a debug bar similar to ones found in other frameworks for the Zend Framework - the Scienta ZF debug bar.

The Scienta ZF Debug Bar is a plugin for the Zend Framework for PHP5. It provides useful debug information displayed in a small bar at the bottom of every page. Time spent, memory usage and number of database queries are presented at a glance. Additionally, included files, a listing of available view variables and the complete SQL command of all queries are shown in separate panels (shown configured with 2 database adapters):

You can check out an example setup here [png] and get the full installation instructions and latest downloads from the project's page.

Matt Curry points out a tool that several CakePHP developers might not know about - the CakePHP debug kit.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

Developer.com has a new tutorial posted today about using the PHP/SWF charting system to graph your data:

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to PHP/SWF Charts, a great solution for building PHP- and Flash-driven charts. PHP/SWF supports a wide variety of charting formats, including bar, candlestick, 3D columns, pie, 3D pie, and advanced charts such as scatter, polar, and composites. See the maani.us PHP/SWF gallery for a great compilation of examples.

They focus mainly on a bar chart to keep things simple. They show how to install the software (dead easy) and how to create a simple first chart complete with a graphic to illustrate. Flat charts are nice, but they show some of the real power of the library by transforming it into a 3D bar graph, giving the columns some depth and all it really takes is changing the chart type.

Developer.com has a new tutorial posted today about using the PHP/SWF charting system to graph your data:

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to PHP/SWF Charts, a great solution for building PHP- and Flash-driven charts. PHP/SWF supports a wide variety of charting formats, including bar, candlestick, 3D columns, pie, 3D pie, and advanced charts such as scatter, polar, and composites. See the maani.us PHP/SWF gallery for a great compilation of examples.

They focus mainly on a bar chart to keep things simple. They show how to install the software (dead easy) and how to create a simple first chart complete with a graphic to illustrate. Flat charts are nice, but they show some of the real power of the library by transforming it into a 3D bar graph, giving the columns some depth and all it really takes is changing the chart type.

PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.

In some situations you might need to display a progress bar—for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn't simply locked up.

They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple "Please wait" kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it's taken to perform the task.

PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.

In some situations you might need to display a progress bar—for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn't simply locked up.

They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple "Please wait" kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it's taken to perform the task.

PHPHacks.com has posted a new tutorial about one of the more requested features when working with a dyanmic scripting languages - creating graphs. They show how to do it with the help of JPGraph, a popular PHP graphing package.

JPGraph is an Object Oriented graph library, which can help you to draw graphs. The real advantage in using JPGraph is its simplicity. Creating a graph at runtime may sound complex! But JPGraph class has been designed in such a way that they hide the complex part from the user. Few lines of coding can create amazing graphs, which you can never think of.

The first step would be to download the JPGraph include files. This can be found at (http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/).Extract all the contents to a folder and put it in a safe place. We will refer these libraries whenever needed.

They start off looking at some of the features JPGraph provides, from some of the most basic out to the complex (like user-specified position of axis and rotation of linear graphs). Following that, it's out to the code - the creation of a simple database to pull the statistics from and the code to make a bar graph out of it, complete with the explaination of what each line does.

PHPHacks.com has posted a new tutorial about one of the more requested features when working with a dyanmic scripting languages - creating graphs. They show how to do it with the help of JPGraph, a popular PHP graphing package.

JPGraph is an Object Oriented graph library, which can help you to draw graphs. The real advantage in using JPGraph is its simplicity. Creating a graph at runtime may sound complex! But JPGraph class has been designed in such a way that they hide the complex part from the user. Few lines of coding can create amazing graphs, which you can never think of.

The first step would be to download the JPGraph include files. This can be found at (http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/).Extract all the contents to a folder and put it in a safe place. We will refer these libraries whenever needed.

They start off looking at some of the features JPGraph provides, from some of the most basic out to the complex (like user-specified position of axis and rotation of linear graphs). Following that, it's out to the code - the creation of a simple database to pull the statistics from and the code to make a bar graph out of it, complete with the explaination of what each line does.

Thomas Larsson has posted this cool little tutorial today that gaves a method (without patching PHP) to allow for multiple asynchronous file uploads.

One of the few things that I find lacking in PHP is the ability to report the progress of a file upload. This means that file uploads, especially uploads of larger files, can be extremely frustrating for end users when they don't know if the upload is progressing or if it has stalled or if it has even started.

He mentions another way around it (a patch from Pdoru), but that requires the previously mentioned patching of the install. His method actually uses a seperate script (called via an iframe) to make the upload while still leaving the page able to be used. The Prototype library is used to update the progress bars based on the amount of the file that's been uploaded (as reported by a PHP script).