On PHPBuilder.com today there's this new tutorial for those out there at the most basic level of PHP development looking to get up to speed on what PHP is and what makes it one of the most popular web scripting languages out there.

PHP (or Personal HomePage Tools) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf over three years ago to track visitors to his homepage. PHP has since evolved into a powerful server-side markup language with syntax that resembles a mix between Perl and C.

They cover all of the key questions - what is PHP, why use it and a simple explanation of a basic script (outputting the date) as well as links to other external resources where you can get more information.

Etienne Kneuss has a new article posted about and introducing a feature that will be implemented in PHP6 - late static bindings.

Late Static Binding (LSB, yes, not LSD) is an OO feature that is meant to be implemented in PHP 6, and maybe even backported to PHP 5. This article will describe what LSB is, what problems it's supposed to solve and how. The patch this article talks about can be found here: late_static_bindings_take6.patch

Etienne explains what they are and includes several code examples to show how they'll work. There's also a mention of "edge cases" where special circumstances might cause the script to fall back on the "magic" functions (__get, __post, etc).

Andrew Johnstone has posted a few handy tips to help you find out where in your application a certain kind of issue might lie - MySQL/PHP performance problems.

In high performance web applications you will always have bottlenecks within your application. Identifying these bottlenecks and optimizing is a tedious task and typically show themselves underload. A single bad/unindexed query can bring a server to its knees. A large number of rows will also help to highlight any poor queries, and on very large datasets you may come to the point where you may have to make decisions whether to denormilize database schema.

One of his recommendations is to run an EXPLAIN on each of the pages, showing what kinds of queries are being run and how long they could take. Once you've found that there is an issue somewhere, then you can move on to his next tip - using mysqlreport and mytop to watch the processes. He includes some sample commands to run, but there's more detailed information in a guide on hackmysql.com.

On the KillerPHP blog today, there's this new post that asks the question of when the choice should be made to use interfaces and why they should be used instead of classes in your code. It's an article/podcast, so for the full effect, grab the audio here.

The post itself are really just notes to support the content in the podcast, but they provide plenty of information by themselves. They talk about what interfaces are, include examples of both them and a class (showing how they differ) and an example of a class using and interface (dog implementing animal).

There are also a few other notes there at the bottom mentioning the purpose of interfaces, which one to choose when, and two miscellaneous notes about how interfaces can help both you and your code.