On the Ibuildings techPortal today, they've posted the latest in their DPC Radio series of podcasts - recordings from this year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this latest episode, they share Christopher Jones' talk "Developing and Deploying High Performance PHP Applications".

This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment. The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database.

Technologies mentioned include connection pooling, monitoring, caching and suspending/resuming transactions for stateful web applications. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can find his slides over on the Oracle Technology Network.

Recently Microsoft sponsored a contest where the entries were PHP applications built on the Windows Azure platform. Brian Swan has posted an interview with Ben Waine, the latest winner of the contest who created an application called the "Twitter Sentiment Engine" that analyzes the sentiment towards various search terms on Twitter.

I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest. [...] I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading a bayesian filter he developed to help filter out some of the twitter spam.