The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted that looks at a framework that could "make PHP go even faster", the Blink framework.

Blink was built to improve high performance applications that consume a lot of server resources, and it uses the Swoole PHP extension to achieve this goal. As an example, we will build a Blink powered notejam for our demo.

First the tutorial walks you through the installation of the Swoole extension (they choose from PEAR but you can also install from GitHub). Next up they install the Blink framework with a new project and fire up the built-in server to ensure it's working correctly. With that up and running they show how to configure the framework/server and get into building the sample "notejam" application. They make use of Twig for templating the frontend and several Illuminate packages for the database, console and filesystem functionality.

The remainder of the post walks through the actual code for the application:

• creating and using the "notes" table
• working with routing
• creating templates
• working with user management

Finally, with this system in place they show how to have a user verify themselves and add a new note to their list.

In a recent post to his blog Marco Tabini talks about the "monkey on the back" syndrome that affects so much of the technology projects these days. His example for PHP? register_globals.

One such example is the register_globals setting in PHP which finally managed to get deprecated in PHP 5.3 (and, the way things are going, may never disappear altogether) after much fighting and gnawing of teeth. [...] The existence of register_globals is problematic in many ways, but it is consistent: as long as you have a version of PHP that supports it installed, you will have the opportunity to use it1. When it is discarded, it ceases to exist, so that rewriting your code becomes a prerequisite to upgrading to a new version of PHP.

He also relates it to a <blink> tag - something that really shouldn't be used any more but, because someone decided it was a good idea in the past, several browsers have included support for it. The moral of the story? Well-planned standards are a good thing.