On the PHPClasses blog today the question is posed "can .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation?" (relating to the use of the Phalanger tool to compile PHP down to .NET assemblies.

Recently Phalanger 3.0 was released introducing numerous improvements in terms of compatibility with the PHP 5.3, interoperability with .NET platform implementations including Mono on Linux, and probably most importantly performance improvements. [...] What motivated this article was that a PHP developer named Rasmus Schultz went on the php.internals mailing list and proposed to switch the official PHP implementation based on Zend for another based on Phalanger.

The post includes some benchmarking results of requests made to a WordPress instance running on various PHP platforms. The Phalanger version came in around 2 seconds faster (average, obviously) than the PHP FastCGI setup. Also included are two suggestions for future PHP versions (v6 anyone?) that could help the language perform even better: Thread-safety for running with less memory waste and the inclusion of a JIT (Just in time compiler - of which a few are mentioned specifically.

In a new post to his blog Keith Casey links to a Developer Smackdown (episode #46) that he participated in while down at SXSW in Austin.

Last month I attended SXSW for the third time. In addition to having a good time and meeting up with friends & colleagues, I had the chance to be a guest on Developer Smackdown to talk about Community and the similarities and differences between them in the PHP and .Net Communities.

You can listen to the recording here - "Unicorn Rhinos, Mexican Martini's, and 2 My Style Community Tacos" - (note, it's on the long side and unfiltered) where Keith and other community members talked about their respective technologies and communities.

Indra Dutta has shared some of his thoughts about which language(s) are best suited for web development work in his latest post - that PHP is a better choice over things like Java and .NET for building most of the functionality out there.

I have worked on java web frameworks like JSF, Echo2, Vaadin, Grails and recently Play. Similarly I have worked on Silverlight, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. My conclusion is that, in overall, PHP frameworks beat both java and .NET frameworks in terms of ease of development, deployment and even maintenance- for creating web sites with moderate complexity. Of course, I do not expect you to take my words for granted.

He lists his "top five" reasons why PHP is the better choice over some of the other frameworks mentioned:

• PHP web hosting options are superior
• PHP provides rapid development and instant gratification to developers
• PHP web frameworks provide a complete stack sufficient to develop a great many web sites
• PHP frameworks provide a low barrier of entry for web developers
• No DLL or jar hell

Of course, no article like this is complete without a load of comments from both sides of the fence, so be sure to read up on those for different perspectives.

Ahmed Shreef has a post he's written up about using SOAP services in PHP (specifically in a CakePHP-based application using some Zend Framework libraries) and drops in a helpful hint at the end about getting .NET clients to play nicely with it.

Last week, I was working on implementing a SOAP server for one of our projects at work, this web service was built to be consumed by some other software that is built using .Net . It wasn't that easy and I faced some problems that made me go crazy for some hours and I wanted to share them here with the solutions.

He includes two snippets of code from his application - one is the SoapController that handles the incoming actions and the other is the handler class with a sample "doSomething" method to return an array. This is where the problem lies. .NET doesn't seem to understand the "Array" return type so it was throwing errors. In order to resolve the problem, hehad to tell the Zend library that he wanted to render the result as a type of "Zend_Soap_Wsdl_Strategy_ArrayOfTypeComplex" for the conversion.

In his most recent blog post Maarten Balliauw proposes an idea of something to be included into PHP that .NET developers are used to as commonplace in their language - extension methods.

For the PHP-related audience, this is probably something new. Let's start with the official definition for extension methods: Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type.

He gives a code example of the concept, showing how you could add this sort of functionality to a PHP class with the help of the __call magic method and some of the Reflection features. The real usefulness, he notes, would be if the idea made it into the core rather than having to do it with the hack he's shown.

Stuart Herbert has decided to get in on the action and enter himself into the WinPHP Challenge (as sponsored by Ibuildings).

Generally, folks choose to deploy web-based applications on Windows Server because they already have Windows Server. Selling them something that will only work on Linux is a tough sell, so a competition like this that seeks to show off how well PHP works on Windows should be another small step forward for all those small ISVs like Box UK who want to sell products written in PHP - provided Microsoft actually do something marketing-wise with the results.

His idea is to build a PHP/.NET tool that can act as a web services gateway. He's already started development and blogs about getting the environment all set up - Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and PHP 5.2.9 For Windows.

He's made another post with an update on his status - finishing out the development environment with PHP up and running, setting up a database, picking an IDE (Visual Studio) and setting up a version control system (git).

In this post he takes about what he's trying to achieve with his application and some use case examples and in this other post some of the feedback he's gotten about his dev environment.

Juozas Kaziukenas has reposted a video created by the RailsEmnvy.com folks (one of several, check out YouTube for more) that does a "Mac vs PC" Apple parody commercial of Ruby and PHP.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

Other videos include Ruby on Rails vs .NET, Ruby on Rails vs Django and, of course, Ruby on Rails vs ColdFusion.

On the Information World Review's blog today they ask if there's a third way (besides making the choice between PHP and .NET) that could bridge things between the two communities - Phalanger.

Now, at a programming level, a new initiative which could finally reconcile the great divide between PHP and .NET programming languages for the good of everyone - courtesy of WCM vendor Jadu. Development of the Phalanger PHP compiler was funded by the firm, but it is now releasing it into the open source community. It basically enables the creation of PHP applications which can run natively under the .NET Framework, allowing firms to make use of PHP apps without needing to rip out existing .NET/Visual Studio environments.

Phil Muncaster (author of the post) suggests that this technology is another reason to remove the "walled gardens" some .NET developers have put up and left in the flexibility and power that PHP has to offer their online development world (and vice versa).

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This post on the PHPImpact blog talks about a compiler that helps to bridge some of the gap between PHP and .NET - Phlanger.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. [...] Phalanger compiles PHP scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be executed by .NET or Mono runtime.

He mentions some of the features of the tool (including interoperability between .NET and PHP and the ability to use current PHP libraries inside the .NET application). More information can be found on the Phlanger website.