The TutsPlus.com site has a new tutorial posted showing you how to boost the performance of your PHP application with the help of PhpFastCache. PhpFastCache is a library that can either be installed manually or via Composer.

PhpFastCache is a library that makes it a breeze to implement caching in your PHP applications. It's an easy-to-use and yet powerful library that provides several APIs to help you implement a caching strategy of your choice without much hassle.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that it's merely a traditional file system caching scheme. In fact, PhpFastCache supports a plethora of adapters that let you choose from high-performance back-ends like Memcache, Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB, and others.

The article starts by helping you install (via Composer) and configure the library with the default file storage method. They talk you through all the code required to configure the caching and using the CacheManager to get and set values as well as checking to see if they're already cached. The tutorial also includes a bonus section showing how to use Redis for the storage rather than local file storage making it easier to share the cache data across multiple systems/servers.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the next part in their series about using Predictive.IO and Lumen to create a simple movie recommendation application (part one is here). In this second part of the series they build on the environment created in the previous article and start developing the actual application.

In the intro, we covered the basics of PredictionIO and installed its dependencies. In this part, we’re going to build the movie recommendation app.

The tutorial starts with a brief configuration section to ensure you have your API keys configured correctly. Then it gets into the code:

• Pulling the data from the Movie DB API
• Creating the endpoint to perform the endpoint
• Picking random movies to show the user and recording their reactions (like/dislike)
• Creating the endpoint to recommend movies

Finally they share the configuration to set up the application deployment and train it with some example content you provide through some basic interactions. Finally they help you set up a cron job to train and redeploy the application every five minutes with the latest interaction information.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the third part of their series looking at using the Solarium tool to hook your PHP application into a SOLR search instance. In this latest part of the series they get down to the actual search implementation.

In the first part I introduced the key concepts and we installed and set up SOLR. In part two we installed and configured Solarium, a library which enables us to use PHP to “talk” to SOLR as if it were a native component. Now we’re finally ready to start building the search mechanism, which is the subject of this installment.

He starts with a simple search example, making a request to select the matches for a given query (given on the URL as a variable "q"). He shows how to run the select and fetch the results as a result set. He enhances this, containing the search logic inside a class and making a template to show the results. He also includes examples of how to use the "Disjunction Max", sorting and pagination functionality. Finally, he looks at a more complex type of search, a faceted search, and includes code examples of making the request and displaying the results.

The LeaseWebLabs.com site has a new post talking about some of their difficulties (and lessons learned) when implementing AES in PHP with mcrypt for a recent project.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the successor of triple DES. When you need a standardized, secure, high performance symmetric cipher it seems like a good choice. Wi-Fi network traffic is encrypted with AES for instance. Also when you want to securely store data in a database or on disk you could choose AES. Many SSDs store data internally using AES encryption. PHP supports AES through “mcrypt”. On Debian based systems (like Ubuntu and Mint) you can install it using “sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt”.

With no direct support for AES in mcrypt, they decided on Rijndael-128 instead and include some code examples of getting its key and block size. They also include an example of the dynamic typing PHP does when converting a string to an integer and the "key padding" PHP automatically does if the key length it too short. A few other problems they discovered during implementation are mentioned as well including null padding on strings and PHP's ignoring of a wrong size initialization vector (no padding, just an error).

On his MaltBlue.com blog Matthew Setter shares his opinion on TableGateways in Zend Framework v2 and wonders if they're "worth it" (as they're not the easiest thing to implement).

Are TableGateways too hard to implement in Zend Framework 2? Are they too hard to justify the effort? That’s what I was asked recently during a Twitter conversation. For me, they’re not. For me, they’re well worth the effort. So I’ve written this post to show why they’re not, and how they bring great flexibility, when implemented correctly. In [this post] I’ll set out why they can be a good solution, as well as why not.

He starts from the origins of PHP scripts, back when they were "a collection of files" and not structured under much of a framework. Complexity added the need for this structure, though, including things like design patterns for common tasks. The TableGateway was one of these. He talks briefly about implementing them in Zend Framework v2 (with some gist examples) and some questions to ask helping you determine if they're "too much" for you app.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to implement OAuth authentication in your application using the Opauth Php library. This library lets you connect to any of a number of OAuth service providers and authenticate.

Open Authentication has evolved as a standard for third-party authentication in recent years and allows us to securely authenticate our application’s users through a standard interface. Twitter and Facebook has been the standouts among dozens of authentication service providers. [...] In this article we’ll explore how we can effectively use Opauth to standardize our authentication strategies. I’ll be using CodeIgniter here, but even if you’re not familiar with CodeIgniter, I suggest you continue reading since it will be similar for other frameworks as well. Once you understand the necessary details for integration, adapting to any framework is super simple.

He talks some about the Opauth library and shows the full authentication flow that your script will follow when using it. Code is included showing how to include and integrate the Opauth library including setup and configuration of the object and the controller/view code to implement the login form.

With the PSR-3 logging interface recently accepted by the PHP-FIG, Jamie Munro has written up a post for PHPMaster.com that shows how to implement the interface with log4php, the Apache logging tool.

With the recent passage of PSR-3, a standard for a common interface for logging libraries, it seems appropriate to discuss the implementation with my favorite logging library. log4php is an open source Apache project that is a very versatile logging framework. Through log4php’s configuration files, logging has a variety of output locations, so it’s possible to send specific log levels to different output locations.

He includes the Composer requirements for the interface and shares the code for a wrapper class that implements the Logger interface and defines methods for each of the logging levels (alert, notice, debug, etc). Also in the post is an example XML configuration for log4php and how to load it into your class instance.

Josh Adell has a new post today looking at the "powerful combination" of using traits and interfaces in PHP applications. He shows how, despite traits not implementing the interface directly, they can be used to make other classes adhere to them simply by "using" them.

If you're not using interfaces in PHP, you are missing out on a powerful object-oriented programming feature. An interface defines how to interact with a class. By defining an interface and then implementing it, you can guarantee a "contract" for consumers of a class. Interfaces can be used across unrelated classes. And they become even more useful when combined with the new traits feature in PHP 5.4.

He illustrates with a package shipping example and uses an "Addressable" Interface to define the structure for both a Company and Users class. He includes code showing how to implement it in a more traditional "implements" way in a class, but also shows an interesting way to achieve the same thing with traits. Having a trait that follows the interface makes it easy to have a class adhere to the interface just by including the trait (or "using" it).

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial that talks about creating interfaces in PHP and how to use them to effectively structure your application.

Starting with PHP 5 the object model was rewritten to add features and bring PHP in line with languages such as Java and Visual Basic .NET. In this article I'll discuss interfaces, which is among the most important features in PHP 5. Other important features include abstract and final classes, methods and additional magic methods. You will learn how to define your own interfaces and how to work with them using different object model mechanisms.

The introduce you to some of the basic concepts behind using interfaces and how to create a basic one - a simple definition of a string class with one method, "getString". They then show how to extend a different example (a RandomNumber interface) and add on an additional method. He also shows how to extend multiple interfaces and integrate functionality from multiple sources, overloading and overrides.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial posted that wants to provide a guide to walk you through a trio of ideas to help with code/idea reuse in your applications - inheritance, composition and delegation.

The popular belief is that reusing implementation, thus producing DRYer code, boils down to exploiting the benefits that Inheritance provides, right? Well, I wish it was that easy! [...] If you don’t know what path to travel when it comes to reusing implementation, in this article I’ll be doing a humble walk-through on the Inheritance/Composition/Delegation trio in an attempt to showcase, side by side, some of their most appealing virtues and clunky drawbacks.

He starts off with a look at Inheritance, showing with a small code sample showing the creation of an interface and a resulting PDO adapter class implementing it. He also shows the concept of composition, following the ideas of the Adapter pattern. In his Delegation example he shows how to implement the creation of the connection object as a part of the class' creation.