Michael Wales has taken a look at what effect HipHop could have on your CodeIgniter application (or lack there of).

So, what does this mean for the CodeIgniter community? In short, absolutely nothing. Most CodeIgniter developers are building applications that will run on shared hosts, virtual private servers or a cloud-based virtualization system. Of that very large group of our community, an extremely small number have the capability to compile the HipHop binaries or alter their configuration in order to serve HipHop pages.

He points out that, for most developers and applications, time is better spent optimizing the actual application - things like reducing the I/O needs, caching, etc. HipHop, unless you have a very high demand and load on the application, won't give much of a gain. He gives the example of Facebook's load and how even it would only relatively recently would benefit from the tool.

Carson McDonald has just released a guide for getting the highly-anticipated release from Facebook, HipHop PHP, up and running on Fedora 12 systems (both 32 and 64 bit flavors).

The first thing to note is that they are only supporting 64 bit systems officially. [...] I'm going to assume at first that you are using a 64 bit system and then end with what you need if you are still using a 32 bit system.

He used an EC2 instance to substitute for a local 64 bit machine, but it works all the same. He includes the commands (package changes) to get the machine where it needs to be to perform the HipHop install and how to get the latest HipHop source from github. Most of the install is handled via packages, but you will need to get into the HipHop source a bit and change a few things for this issue. With everything in place you can run a cmake/make on the source and wait for the resulting binary to be created.

He's condensed down this whole process into one script for those that want a simpler solution.

According to this new message posted by Scott MacVicar of Facebook, the first versions of HipHop have officially been pushed to their account on github.

Today we've pushed an initial version of HipHop onto GitHub at http://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php. This source should build on CentOS 5.2 and Ubuntu 9.10. Any specific hard to find libraries are bundled where the license permits. Remember that while we're running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you. You should be comfortable with this sort of software as it's the first public release.

You can read more about the release on its github wiki and how to get it installed. Issues can be reported to this list.

With the announcement Facebook as made about opening up their chat service to outside connections, several developers are taking the opportunity to create their own scripts to interface with the service. One developer, Abhinav Singh has posted a tutorial about the sample application he's created to do just that.

Today facebook officially announced availability of it's chat through jabber/xmpp clients. This is a big win for XMPP, with almost 400 million new probable users adding into XMPP club. In this post, I will demonstrate how to connect to facebook chat servers using Jaxl client library in PHP. It can further be used to make custom chat bots for facebook.

He shows how to use the Jaxl library to make the connection, setting up some basic environment variables and making the connection to the server. The index.php file that comes with the library reads this config file and sends a default message to the server and returns the response.

Even before they've release the source for their much hyped HipHop PHP tool, Facebook has slipped another tool in under the radar and have already released it in github - XHP.

On the official announcement they describe what the tool is and what it can do for you:

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks. XHP does this by making PHP understand XML document fragments, similar to what E4X does for ECMAScript (JavaScript). While PHP is typically used to write front-end code, by itself it isn't a very good language for generating HTML (as evidenced by the popularity of templating engines like Smarty). XHP is something between a programmatic UI library and a full templating system

Rasmus Lerdorf took the opportunity to play with this new tool and run some benchmarks on its performance in a more real situation than the form example Facebook gave:

The real question here is what is this runtime xml validation going to cost you. [...] Note that to build XHP you will need flex 2.5.35 which most distros won't have installed by default. Grab the flex tarball and ./configure && make install it. Then you are ready to go.

He created a simple class (a "singleton") and ran some benchmarks against it with Siege. I won't share the results of those benchmarks here, though - you'll need to visit Rasmus' site for those (but here's a hint, the future's not bright).

In a recent interview posted on the O'Reilly Radar site, Msc Slocum talks with Kevin Tatroe about what Facebook's HipHop means for business.

Facebook's PHP overhaul, HipHop, reportedly cut CPU usage on the company's servers by around 50 percent. You don't have to be a programmer to understand that kind of result. [...] asked Kevin Tatroe, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming PHP, to weigh in on HipHop's functionality and its broader applications.

Mac starts with some basic questions - how will it help developers, how will it help businesses - and then asks for some clarification as to what the project really is and how difficult Kevin thinks it will be for companies to adopt.

The web has been buzzing since Facebook announced their HipHop tool for PHP applications. Here's some of the comments and reactions people (and companies) around the PHP community have had to the announcement:

• The Echolibre blog
• Christian Stocker
• Brandon Savage
• Philip Olson
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Marco Tabini
• Chris Jones (Oracle)
• Terry Chay
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Stuart Herbert
• Vid Luther
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• SitePoint PHP blog
• Stanislav Malyshev
• Lukas Smith
• Stefan Priebsch
• the ServerGrove blog
• Shawn Stratton
• Jake Smith

Check back for more to be added to the list as they are shared with the community.

Facebook has made their official announcement about their secretive PHP project today and have scheduled an event for them to give the world more information on the project.

Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.

The post elaborates a bit more on what the tool is (not really a compiler, more of an optimizer) and why they decided to go this direction. There's a bit of description on how the tool works and how the transformation happens.

Stay tuned to this post around 7:30pm Pacific time for more information.

If you've been following along with some of the articles about the compiler Facebook is developing for PHP, you might want to check out these comments from ReadWriteWeb.com (by Mike Melanson) with more from his point of view.

According to our sources, Facebook has been working on a PHP compiler that will increase speed by around 80% and offer a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that will offer a number of advantages. The project is very similar to Google's Unladen Swallow project, which rebuilt the Python compiler, boosting the speed fivefold and opening the door for multi-language integration.

Included are also some comments from Richard Crowley about what Facebook could be releasing, a compiler that would still allow PHP to remain interpreted but provide the speed of being compiled. Some of the comments on the post wonder how something like this compiler compares to an opcode cache and doubts on whether it will end up being open sourced at all.

You can also get another opinion on what will be released in this article from the All Facebook blog. They reinforce that the announcement will come today and how much potential something like this could have to change what PHP could become.

According to this new article from the Software Development Times Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch and will be releasing it soon as an open source project.

So, why has Facebook rewritten the PHP runtime? Because PHP is obviously too slow for their tastes. A few years ago, I had a coffee meeting with some of the folks from Zend. When they asked what I had been hearing about PHP in the market from my sources, I hemmed and hawed, then told them that I had heard people complaining about how slow PHP was.

Other sources suggest the release won't be a full runtime but instead a sort of compiler for PHP applications including an interview with a Facebook employee who drops a hint about their future plans for the language.