On the Ibuildings blog there's a new post that looks at the "evils" of a crucial part of many web applications - caching.

Recently a colleague stated that in theory, caching could be considered 'evil'. Now 'evil' is a very broad term which is used a lot in the IT community, but what does it really mean when we're talking about technical solutions? I asked around, but couldn't find a clear cut definition, so I went searching...

In his search he came across a wide range of definitions, including one mentioning bad design or implying a lack of goals with a summarized meaning of "does harm to your aesthetic and engineering judgment". He applies this to caching and, because of it being a sort of counter-intuitive way to handle content (not just the pull and push), it could be considered slightly evil. Interesting interpretation...

However, as anyone will tell you caching is a very necessary evil. [...] So while it does some minor harm to aesthetic and engineering judgment, the user gets a fast experience, which is really all that matters in the end.

In this new post to the Ibuildings blog Stefan Koopmanschap talks about the Dutch PHP TestFest and how it all turned out.

This dutch event, which was sponsored by Ibuildings, was part of the global PHP TestFest initiative, which aims to get a higher test coverage for the PHP language and with that stabilize the language even more - something that will benefit all users of PHP. Back in May, we already deemed our event a big success with 10 attendees, a great presentation by Sebastian Bergmann and a huge number of tests written. But it turns out to be an even bigger success.

Out of the 158 tests written up by the group 39 of them were accepted and are included in the testing suite. As a result, one of the members of the team (Felix de Vliegher) was also given commit rights to the full CVS repository for PHP.

Ivo Jansch has posted some great news to the Ibuildings blog today - things about the upcoming Dutch PHP conference.

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th).

The first bits of great news surround the attendance - the conference day alone is over 95% full and the tutorial day is even more packed with only a few seats left. A pre-conference part has also been set up (see the post for the details of when and where). They've even set up a page of travel information to help you if you're looking for a way to get to the Amsterdam RAI for the two-day event.

Ibuildings has announced a new partnership with php|architect to supplement the current training that Ibuildings does with php|architect course material.

Ivo Jansch comments on his blog:

I'm happy to announce that as of now, we have a partnership agreement with php|architect! We will be adding the php|architect trainings to our existing training portfolio, which means that php|architects trainings can now also be delivered on-site in the countries where Ibuildings operates. php|architect is a strong brand when it comes to PHP knowledge, so I'm very proud they teamed up with us!

According to the press release, the new material will also include many of the php|architect books up for sale.

Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has written up a summary of an event he recently attend and spoke at in the Netherlands - the PHP Business Seminar.

I've just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by IBuildings and Sogeti.

He talks about the conference, some of the presentations (a bit of which he caught, they were all in Dutch) and his experience presenting - twice, once with Red Bull and once without. If you want a bit more detail (and the slides from his talk) check out Cal's post on his personal blog too.

On the IBuildings blog today, Sandy Pleyte has posted a look at using the ATK framework and what kind of effect its own recently added caching system (atkCache) has on its performance.

Now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval.

It supports lots of different backend caching methods - APC, eAccelerator, the Zend Platform functionality, memcache, xcache and both file and variable caching.

He includes an example of its use - creating an object to cache to a file, configuring it with options like lifetime and path, and an example of its use (to cache a theme for a web page).

Ivo Jansch points out a recent interview he was asked to do in the Computerworld UK magazine about the recent launch of the Ibuildings company there in the UK.

I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world. The result is online here.

He also asks readers how they see PHP adoption going in their companies: "Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region."