The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today (from Vikram Vaswani) that focuses on making charts and graphs with the help of the GDChart extension for PHP.

This extension, which is freely available from PECL, can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in dynamically generating graphical representations of numerical data at run-time. Over the next few pages, I'll introduce you to this extension, illustrating its important features and showing you just how easy it is to get your Friday evening back.

The tutorial shows how to get and install the extension as well as including a few usage examples - a simple charting of values (with the different chart types defined), comparing more than one set of data, changing the aesthetics of the output and a detailed look at a few of the chart types' output.

As the PHP:Impact blog points out there's a new post from Neil Garb talking about the (loose) coupling going on inside the Zend Framework.

One of the Zend Framework's strongest drawing cards, as I see it, is its loosely-coupled structure. The name Zend Framework may be a misnomer, in fact, as ZF is more a set of reusable libraries than an actual application framework. I won't go into detail about the advantages of loose coupling, but a recent discussion on the ZF mailing list prompted me to investigate just how loosely coupled the framework is.

He's created a few graphs to show the extent of the coupling - a directed graph, the density of it and example code showing deep and shallow coupling. Here's his results.

Jack Herrington has posted a new tutorial to the Zend Developer Zone today showing how to combine PHP, your database of choice and Flex to create a dashboard in your application.

Let's face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday.

He shows how to create a simple Flex application that takes in XML data (from whatever backend, he uses a PHP script that uses DOM) and displays the information - his sample traffic data - as a graph. This graph is an extension of the Elixir library from ILOG and makes dropping information into graphs and charts simple.

Screenshots of the Flex side of things and code for the PHP side are both provided.

In this quick post to the ApacheLounge forum, Steffen shares some stats running PHP in two different methods of running PHP on Apache - mod_php and fastcgi.

With PHP as module after some time the memory usage of Apache is growing and growing up to ~800M.
With mod_fcgid is stays on a steady ~100M
PHP configuration: only with the extension php_mysql.dll and eaccelerator.dll

A graph of the statistics is also provided.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

Developer.com has a new tutorial posted today about using the PHP/SWF charting system to graph your data:

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to PHP/SWF Charts, a great solution for building PHP- and Flash-driven charts. PHP/SWF supports a wide variety of charting formats, including bar, candlestick, 3D columns, pie, 3D pie, and advanced charts such as scatter, polar, and composites. See the maani.us PHP/SWF gallery for a great compilation of examples.

They focus mainly on a bar chart to keep things simple. They show how to install the software (dead easy) and how to create a simple first chart complete with a graphic to illustrate. Flat charts are nice, but they show some of the real power of the library by transforming it into a 3D bar graph, giving the columns some depth and all it really takes is changing the chart type.

Sebastian Bergmann points out that he will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Conference in Quebec (2008). He will be presenting three talks/tutorials:

• Test-Driven Object-Oriented Programming - Learning and Understanding (with Marcus Borger): This PHPLab is an in-depth introduction to object-oriented and pattern-based programming using PHP 5. You will learn everything necessary to write your own cutting-edge components and applications - and of course how to use and extend components from other people or companies.
• PECL: The PHP Language Workbench: A look into PECL shows how flexible the language core of PHP, the Zend Engine, is.
• Graph-Oriented Programming with PHP: This session presents the eZ Components' workflow engine, its possible applications and the underlying principles and techniques.

You can find out more about the conference from their main website (including other speakers that will be presenting) as well as registering to reserve your space for the March 12th-14th conference.

Mikko Koppanen has another post to his blog today that once again shows the combination of PHP and Imagick to create/output an image - this time, it's a simple line graph.

This example demonstrates how Imagick can be used to create graphs. This graphing class itself is mostly a demonstrative example. There are also some hardcoded values in the graph (like the steps in the values on the left hand side) but it should not be hard to refine it into a more elegant graphing solution.

The graph is made using the Imagick drawing functions that extends the standard "draw" class. The code produces a graph with a (straight) line drawn from point to point - code and output examples are both included.

Jeff Moore has posted and shared an interesting graph showing something I'd never thought about comparing one language versus another on - the number of keywords it uses.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

On Nexen.net today, Damien Seguy presents some numbers on something that there's not a lot of research done on - the number of servers running multiple PHP versions.

This subject was hot at the birth of PHP 4 (running PHP 4 and PHP 3, or course), and it is coming back with a vengeance for PHP 5, backed by the immense user base of PHP 4. If PHP 5 is the default installation in 2008, what will happen to all those users? [...] Based on this observation and my earlier experience of cohabitation, I wondered if there was any indicator of multiple PHP installation.

He used the same tracker he implements for his normal monthly stats and ran a modified query to get the numbers of multiple-version servers that are out there. He's graphed some of the results. Based on his results, though, he notes a market for multiple PHP installations but "a pretty small one", noting that you're probably better off making the jump out to PHP5 anyway.