On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post from Matthew Turland talking about PHP's quest for performance and some of the recent advancements that have made better performing applications even more possible.

While it’s sufficient for many users, as PHP sees increased use by large sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, the ability to serve more requests on fewer servers becomes increasingly important. Some efforts have been made in this area in the last few years, both within and outside the PHP internals team. However, understanding exactly what’s going on requires a bit of background both in history and concepts.

He goes through some of the origins of the PHP language (from the early days with Rasmus Lerdorf) to the fact that the PHP language itself is interpreted - complete with some of the overhead that comes with that. He also mentions various projects that have tried to compile PHP back down to C to increase performance like Roadsend, HipHop and, most recently, the HipHop virtual machine from Facebook.

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, Jaybill McCarthy has written up a Blog post about ten of the PHP myths that are common on the web and the facts that dismiss them.

I am a PHP developer. Maybe even a halfway decent one. As such, I often find myself engaged in conversations on the subject of web application development in general and PHP in particular. I am continually flustered by the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that technical and non-technical people alike hold about this humble programming language.

Some of the points included in his "top ten" list are things like "PHP Encourages Sloppy Code", "PHP is slow because it’s interpreted" and "PHP apps all look the same".

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, Jaybill McCarthy has written up a Blog post about ten of the PHP myths that are common on the web and the facts that dismiss them.

I am a PHP developer. Maybe even a halfway decent one. As such, I often find myself engaged in conversations on the subject of web application development in general and PHP in particular. I am continually flustered by the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that technical and non-technical people alike hold about this humble programming language.

Some of the points included in his "top ten" list are things like "PHP Encourages Sloppy Code", "PHP is slow because it’s interpreted" and "PHP apps all look the same".