Recently on his blog Jack Diederich took a look at three different interpreters for Ruby, PHP and Python to see how they were implemented as compared to the language they're used in.

The other day I went poking around the Ruby and PHP interpreters (the current stable versions). I hadn't looked inside PHP since the 4.x series and Ruby I had never checked out. Like CPython the internals of both PHP and Ruby look something like their resulting language, but in C. For each interpreter I just compiled it and looked at how core types and extension types were implemented.

For PHP, he went with the PHP 5.2.13 release and talks about the compile process (a bit spammy), running the unit tests that come included and how the interpreter handles data types, core types and objects.

Brian Swan has posted the second part of his series looking at the difference between the MSSQL driver and the SQLSRV drivers for connecting to SQL Server databases from PHP (part one can be found here). He gets a bit more detailed in this second post.

I'm aiming to provide a high-level comparison that you might use if you were considering moving to the SQLSRV extension, but I think there is also some interesting information if you are just curious about the differences. [...] In cases where a short note wasn't enough (and there were several of these), I've provided relevant links to topics in the SQLSRV documentation.

He talks about things that one offers that the other doesn't, like prepared statements (sqlsrv) and working with stored procedures (mssql). He also mentions error handlng, persistent connections and scrollable cursors in sqlsrv. Finally he gets into a one-to-one function comparison of the two drivers with the sqlsrv function list coming up a bit short compared to the features of the more recend (and well-supported) mssql driver.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post that talks about source code compilers and a few of the popular PHP compilers to help you optimize your code.

Several PHP compilers existed since many years ago, but the fact that it is actually Facebook releasing their [HipHop] compiler made it a very relevant matter for PHP developers, as Facebook is currently the busiest site in the world that is developed mostly in PHP.

He briefly explains what compilers can do for you (with diagrams) and takes a look at some of the native machine code compilers like Roadsend, PHC Open Source Compiler and Facebook's HipHop. He's also run a few benchmarks to show the performance of the resulting compiled code from each compiler. Some general conclusions are also included like dynamic vs. static PHP, opcode caching and the effects of I/O operations on script execution.

New from OurBlogLog.com there's a new post that compares Joomla and Drupal based on their features, ease of use and extensibility.

I've had more than a few conversations recently about which CMS is better. From the Joomla camp I hear, "Joomla is easier. Joomla has a great user interface." From its competitor I hear, "Drupal is more flexible and it has tagging." It's the Pepsi versus Coke debate for open source CMSes.

For the two CMSes there's a list of the good and bad things about each - good on Joomla's side was the easy deployment and versioning of content, good for Drupal was its flexibility and the high profile sites that use it. On the bad side, Joomla has a limitation for one-site-one-install and limited permissions handling. Overall, though, the author found that they both had their strengths and weaknesses and that, if you're shopping around for a CMS, find what fits best for you and your organization.

Instead of comparing the software itself, the GnomeOnTheRun.com blog takes a look at the project homepages of three major PHP CMS/blogging tools - Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress - to see when they might tell us about the project itself. (Some of the homepages are actually built using the software too).

I found some interesting things that might shed some light onto the different projects. This is all based on January 11th, and 28th homepages, so by the time you read this a lot may have changed. Rather than go into great detail, I'll provide short lists of interesting things I noticed.

He looks at three different sides of the sites - how the markup is structured and if they conformed to an HTML standard, the overall performance of the sites and the actual content of the site (how useful it is, the organization, etc). You'll have to read the post to see what his conclusions were, though.

In response to the (now somewhat infamous) post from Fabien Potencier about templating in PHP and comparisons of his own templating system (Twig) with various other offerings around the community, Thomas Koch notes that the eZ Components template is not slow and that maybe Fabien just wasn't using it correctly.

Dear Fabien, I think it's not fair to blog a benchmark without publishing the code you used to do the benchmark! But even without the code and without doing my own benchmark, I can offer some explanations, why eZ Components may have been the slowest in your benchmark and why you've compared apples with oranges.

He includes a few code examples - both from Twig and the eZ Components - and how they compare in terms of how the templates are made, what they're parsed into and things that could cause a difference in performance between the two.

As a way of answering the common language comparison question (PHP vs Java/Perl), Stefan Mischook has posted these thoughts comparing the languages himself.

[For web development] PHP is the way to go. Perl is a good language but it was not designed initially for web development - that functionality was added later.

He talks about his experience using Perl in web-based environments and some of the issues he's seen around using it or Java for web applications...including a suggestion for Java's place in the world:

Java is great for the enterprise...that means, if you plan to be working for very large companies. But it takes a lot longer to create anything in Java vs PHP.

According to this post (by Cal Evans) on the Ibuildings blog (and this report from the EDC), PHP has come out as one of the top scripting languages on the web today.

In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey. [...] Given the wide variety of topics, there is no way PHP will ever score first place across the board, however, that is not a bad thing.

Categories the languages were rated on included ease of use, extensibility, community, availability of tools and memory management. PHP got high marks on most with a few (like client-side scripting) lagging behind. Cal sees it from two angles, though - one to celebrate how far PHP has come and the other to look forward to see what things the language needs to improve on.

Jani Hartikainen takes a look at two of the major PHP ORM libraries in this new post - Propel and Doctrine.

The best PHP ORM libraries, Doctrine and Propel. Last year I compared them to each other, and now it's time to get a fresh look at how they have advanced in about a year - Is Doctrine still the better of the two? This time, I'll also look at the features of each in more depth.

He goes through some of the features (basic and advanced), how easy they are to use and their connections to the database. His personal preference? Doctrine works better for his needs.

InfoWorld.com has asked a Buggles-inspired question about PHP and Java and how they influence each other's use - "Did PHP kill the Java radio star?"

Zend's CEO makes a claim that PHP is disrupting Java. Not only would I beg to differ, I think the use of Java and PHP (and other dynamic scripting languages) together is much more interesting to customers than an "either/or" discussion. [...] To argue that PHP is disrupting Java usage is, if you ask me, missing the point.

They suggest that PHP and Java really aren't in any kind of competition. Instead, they're separate tools that should be applied correctly when the need fits their skills. If anything, PHP has encouraged Java, especially with the creation of a Java-to-PHP bridge that lets them talk back and forth.