In this new post to his site Mattias Geniar goes in circles...from Apache to Nginx and back in terms of how it relates to PHP.

As with many technologies, the PHP community too evolves. And over the last 6 or 7 years, a rather remarkable circle has been made by a lot of systems administrators and PHP developers in that regard.

He talks about the "early days" and the rise of Apache as the "A" in the LAMP stack. Then Nginx was created/released and PHP developers saw it as a viable option. He talks about how PHP worked with this server and the solutions that were found to "hack" them together. There were issues around the relationship, though, and - in the author's perspective - the circle has come back around to Apache, just with a bit more smarts about how it's configured.

In a new post today, Martynas Jusevicius shows how to combine a little SQL magic with the Propel framework to fins the distance between two places:

Eventually the simple distance formula that I have blogged about turned out to be too inaccurate, even for locations within city bounds. I needed to use a formula to calculate great-circle distance which takes into account that the Earth is a sphere.

He includes the SQL to pull the data in the right format and the PHP code (using Propel) to reproduce it without having to write it by hand (complete with the bind variables to help with security and consistency).