On the PHP::Impact blog, there's a new tutorial showing how to use the Phing build system to deploy your application.

A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation. [...] But, having a large collection of shell scripts can lead to a maintenance nightmare, reason why I decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. I chose Phing because it's simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

He talks about DbDeployTask (an optional task for database revisions) and how to use the system for Agile development practices.

Mike Willbanks has posted another part in his "PHP performance" series today. In his previous article, he talked about caching techniques including things like opcode caching and database memory tables. This time he talks about getting the most out of your MySQL database.

Application level SQL performance is much different than the performance of the SQL query itself but rather how it has been designed to work in the application. Many of the items I will be addressing in this area is designing your application to make less queries thus improving scalability and likely performance. However, performance does not always equal scalability as the same with scalability does not always equal performance.

He looks at a few different topics like lazy connections, iterating queries, need-based selects, normalization and a few simple things that you can apply to every SQL your application uses to optimize it as much as possible.

A new tutorial has been posted on the PHPFreaks.com site today dealing with paginating your data (in their example, info from a database).

It makes way more sense to break up your list into page-sized chunks, and only query your database one chunk at a time. This drastically reduces server processing time and page load time, as well as gives your user smaller pieces of info to digest, so he doesn't choke on whatever crap you're trying to feed him. The act of doing this is called pagination.

They include the full script for those that want to jump right in and the detailed info in the rest of the tutorial for those that need a little more insight. The script gets a count of the results first then uses the LIMIT format for MySQL to restrict the number of rows returned each time and where to start those returned rows from.

In this new post to the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutki points out the method for using grouping in your CakePHP application's queries (specifically in the new Release 2).

Having promised it in the first post on how to do Group By in CakePHP I worked on an array() version for the group statement in Model::find() calls. So I implemented it.

His code shows the calls to find() the grouped information and accompanying unit test assertEquals calls to check that the results are correct. His examples show a few different ways to accomplish the same thing.

The ThinkPHP blog points out a milestone for one of the libraries that help set PHP on its current course - PHPLIB (from Kris Koehntopp).

This great collection of classes was in my eyes the first real useful library which delivered the solution to most of the basic / standard problems in PHP based software projects. [...] The easy implementation of DB-abstraction, template engine, authentication, permissions, session management and others made it easy to handle these problems in a standardized way. The strict object oriented code gave the developer the necessary flexibility to customize and extend the code where he/she needs it.

This year is (about) the ten year mark for the existence of the language and several commentors on the post remember the "good ole days" of PHP3 sessions, permissions and even the first version of Zend's website.

Jack Herrington has posted a new tutorial to the Zend Developer Zone today showing how to combine PHP, your database of choice and Flex to create a dashboard in your application.

Let's face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday.

He shows how to create a simple Flex application that takes in XML data (from whatever backend, he uses a PHP script that uses DOM) and displays the information - his sample traffic data - as a graph. This graph is an extension of the Elixir library from ILOG and makes dropping information into graphs and charts simple.

Screenshots of the Flex side of things and code for the PHP side are both provided.

Daniel Cousineau submitted a new blog post he's come up with that looks at using hierarchical data in a MySQL database.

I recently had fun with an all-to-common issue with SQL driven websites: hierarchical data. For those who don't like big words, think trees. Other people have already discussed storage methods, and I would actually highly suggest you read the writeup if you haven't already.

He includes a sample table you can work from and some code that can be used to generate a select (based on a $depth variable) parent/child values from it. A few simple function calls later and you have a nested array or lots of little subarrays maintaining the parent/child relationships the database has.

Padraic Brady has an addendum he's posted to his "making a blogging application with the Zend Framework" series dealing with a few random issues from along the way.

The interesting thing about live publishing of a long tutorial series is that it's not flawless. In fact it's the opposite. [...] To cover all these I'll occasionally highlight the more important ones both in notes to new entries, or where they slip past me, in Addendum entries like this one.

There's four sections in this update - one dealing with the referencing of base URLs, another worrying about magic_quotes settings, an updated database schema for the project and the final about removing non-english characters in the title URLs.

Along with the popularity of Twitter has come one of it biggest problems - its instability. More and more people are using the service every day and some are leaving when they encounter the frustration of too much downtime. Enter a project that Graham Christensen is getting started - Stablr, a PHP-based version of the popular web service.

Stablr, the proposed name, will be the main gateway for it's users. People will post to Stablr, which will then (when it can) forward it to Twitter. If a Stablr users posts to Twitter directly, the message will be retrieved and replicated on Stablr. Responses to posts, direct messages, and tweets from friends of Stablr users would also be replicated.

He's already seen some great response from the community with offers to help and has taken it to the next level by coming up with a five-page document detailing the plans behind the project (using things like caching, an Access database and Jabber integration).

Padraic Brady has posted part eight of his series guiding you through his construction of Zend Framework-based blogging software:

In Part 8 of the ongoing saga describing how to build a real world blog application using the Zend Framework we finally reach the point at which we concentrate on blog entries. At the end of this Part, we will be able to create and edit entries in preparation for Part 9 when we will explore displaying them to the world!

In this part, he shows how to add in the Entry controller with an Add action inside (and what code goes in them). He makes a Zend_Form extended form and throws in some validation, a use of HTMLPurifier and the code to push these entries into your database.