Alejandro Celaya has a recent post to his site showing you how you can delay constructor execution in your services by making use of the "lazy services" functionality provided by the Zend ServiceManager component.

A couple years ago I wrote a post about how to improve PHP applications performance by using zend-servicemanager lazy services.

In that article I explained how the ServiceManager takes advantage of the proxy design pattern to delay the creation of services, when they are marked as lazy.

That can improve performance if the object is resource consuming, but that is not the only advantage behind proxies.

He starts with a use case for using these "lazy services" based on some changes in an open source library he maintains to add in geolocation support. The library requires a database file when the object is created but on the first run, no file is downloaded yet. He made use of the lazy service loading to only initialize the GeoIp2 library when it is requested and not when the script starts.

Asvin Balloo has posted the second part of his geolocate with PHP tutorial series - using the mapping information gathered from the previous article to plot them on a map.

In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I'll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.

The full code is provided - the PHP to pull the latitude/longitude information from the GeoIP library and the Javascript to get the Google Map to plot the point. You can check out the live demo for an example or just grab the source and try it out for yourself.

On his blog today Asvin Balloo has posted the first part of his look at his method for geolocating the visitors to your website using the PEAR GeoIP package and the MaxMind GeoLite Country information.

In this first part, he just makes sure that you have what you need installed before really getting started. Brief installation instructions are provided and example code is included to make sure things are up and working correctly (a lookup for whatever IP you're coming from).

It uses the lookupCountryName method to translate the information based on the MaxMind data.