Miro has submitted some information about the latest meeting of the Zagreb PHP User Group happening December 13th at 6pm in the Multimedia Institute:

Although Zagreb PHP Meetup started only 3 months ago with monthly meetups (up to 30 developers coming), our next meeting will be first meetup with organized talks. December meetup will have 5 talks with themes like 'How to write readable code?', 'Flex & PHP development' , 'Introduction to test driven development' && 'MySQL - explain explained'.

We would like to invite all interested PHP and non-PHP developers that would like to listen to some of best Croatian PHP devs (and understand Croatian language) to come on December 13th from 6PM to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 in Zagreb. Unfortunately we are limited with number of available seats so please signup at http://zgphp.eventbrite.com/.

Due to space limitations, there's only 12 seats available so hurry and reserve your spot if you'd like to attend (it's free)!

Have a user group meeting you'd like announced? Let us know!

Eran Galperin has posted a few helpful tips (ones you can "actually use") for optimizing your database and how your application uses it.

I understand the need for simplicity because of the wide audience of Smashing Magazine, but I'd wish they'd give something more than the absolute basics you could find in almost any other site out there [in their recent tutorial]. I also didn't like some of the methods mentioned there for profiling (or the code itself), so I here is my starter guide to optimizing database performance.

Tips included in his post center around a different set of questions:

• When should you optimize the database?
• Think about profiling first, optimizing last
• How EXPLAIN can find the big problems
• When caching should be used

Some code is included, but only briefly since his point is more about the server than the client (script) side of things.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.