Focusing on PHP day in and day out is nice, but sometimes it's good to branch out a bit. Kevin Yank agrees and decided to give Python a try. He's written up this post to the SitePoint PHP blog as he explores the language from a PHP developer's perspective.

Like may SitePoint readers, I cut my teeth on PHP. I've become very comfortable with it over the years, warts and all. PHP continues to be a dependable choice, but PHP hasn’t changed a whole lot lately. [...] Python has a lot in common with PHP: it’s a dynamically typed, open source scripting language with excellent documentation and a thriving community around it.

He includes a few basic "Hello World" kinds of examples in Python just to introduce you to the language structure (indenting for code structure? that's crazy talk for us PHPers) and some of the handy features of the language like sequences and the language's automatic namespace support.

DevShed is wrapping up their series looking at benchmarking your PHP applications with the third part - a look at comparing execution times of scripts that can either pull from a database or from a flat file.

This large, complex subject offers numerous possibilities for experimentation, which means that you'll surely have tons of fun creating timing systems with PHP. [...] his article, then, will be focused on evaluating different scripts that fetch sets of records, first from a database, and then from flat files.

They use the Timer class they defined in a previous part of the series and wrap it around both a database class (pulling user information from a MySQL database) and a fetch to a flat file for similar information. General exceptions are handled as a part of the resource connection class.

In this post on the Dokeos blog, there's a comparison of the mbstring function and the iconv library as it pertains to their use on multi-byte strings.

I was wondering today why use mbstring rather than iconv in Dokeos, and honestly I didn't remember exactly why I had chosen mbstring in the past, but finding information about the *differences* between the two. [...] Searching a bit more, I found a PPT presentation from Carlos Hoyos on Google.

Essentially, it boils down to how the library is integrated - mbstring is bundled and iconv is pulled from an external source. So, if you're looking for maximum portability, he recommends mbstring.

A little while back Matthew Turland posted an interesting item to has blog talking about what he calls the "odd triangle" of PHP, MySQL and Oracle.

In [an article from Maggie Nelson in a blog entry], she remarks on the article being MySQL-oriented and how limited MySQL explain plan support is compared to Oracle. I've had some thoughts in my head for a while that are related to these points, so I finally decided to, knock on wood, put pen to paper.

Matthew talks about things he agrees with (Oracle over MySQL when it comes to hierarchal data and set operators) and some of the things that can make Oracle, with all its power, fall by the wayside. This includes its licensing, the administration costs and some of the recent developments between Sun and MySQL.

As Johannes Schluter mentions, the results of some benchmarking have been posted concerning the performance of PHP 5.3 versus the current 5.2 series:

Dmitry posted results of performance test comparing PHP 5.2 and 5.3 to internals which are impressive numbers.

The improvements were measured based on several popular pieces of software like Drupal, typo3 and WordPress. The overall performance gian was around thirty percent across the board.

Davey Shafik has done a mini-review comparing the Zend Guard software with a similar offering from IonCube, IonCube Encoder to help protect your PHP applications.

For the last several years, we have been successfully using the IonCube PHP encoder. It works well, providing us with as secure a solution as we could wish for, for our code. [...] Due to the amount of head pounding involved in finding this issue [where IonCube was removing a valid logic branch], I started to consider using Zend Guard instead, figuring that Zend has far more resources and more experience in this arena, we might see less issues.

He details their upgrade process including comments on the included GUI and how it "just works" (once it's set up)

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook compares two of the popular component libraries out there - PEAR and the Zend Framework (yes, it can be considered a grouping of components too).

Now that the Zend Framework is ready for 'prime time', I've been considering the Pear framework with regards to how it now fits in the PHP world.

He suggests that not could both be considered component libraries, but might also both be frameworks (based on a definition that a framework is a "consistent set of components that are designed to work together in a unified manner"). He also asks about the need for something like PEAR now that the Zend Framework has come along, getting Jonathan Lebensold's opinion too.

On the ThisLab website, they've posted their comparison of two PHP frameworks, both based on some of the same code - CodeIgniter and Kohana.

I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. [...] I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter has progressed well and gained many web developers' trust, despite a few glitches. One of which was the spawn of the fork: Kohana.

He points out the Wikipedia page showing some of the differences but the real interest in this post is the more than complete table directly comparing the two frameworks (specific versions of each). Items compared on include supported databases, community, conventions, caching, web service support and unit testing integration.

Rob Thompson has posted about some simple benchmarking he did comparing the speed of a series of "if" statements versus one "switch" with multiple cases.

I got curious about which is actually more efficient at matching a random integer with a set of conditionals. So, I setup a script to create a set of large scripts to test the speed of these different constructs. Using the 'time' command, I measured the speed at which the condition could match a random number.

His results found that the switch statement is generally more than 2 times as fast at matching a simple integer. His tests, however, didn't go through much more than this simple test. It'd be interesting to see what it would do with something more complex (like longer strings or handling the result of an evaluation inside the definition of the switch().

On the Rails for PHP blog today, there's a new article talking about a method that is normally used to handle configuration files and the like - YAML:

Besides PHP itself, the most popular config file formats for PHP applications are INI and XML files. [...] YAML is a relatively new format that has been pioneered by the Ruby and Rails communities. It blends the best aspects of XML and INI, giving us a format with the flexibility of XML and the ease-of-use of INI.

He compares the YAML support - Ruby's built-in support and PHP's functionality via either the Spyc library/Syck extension or through a PEAR package from the Horde functionality. Quick code snippets are provided for each.