In this latest post to his site, Hannes Magnusson looks briefly at an interesting use for PHP's streams functionality - reading data from a MongoDB connection as a streaming resource.

PHP Streams have several pretty nifty features that most people don't really know about; Filters, Wrappers, Context, and Notifications. Documenting these is a bit difficult, and getting the user to discover these features is even more problematic, as these things usually live outside of the normal path (function reference). Maybe I'll blog about these things in the future, but for now I want to talk about the Stream (context) Notifications - or more specifically; Stream Notifications in the MongoDB extension for PHP.

He talks some about what stream notifications are on a basic level and some general use cases for them. From there he moves into the MongoDB world and some changes in the mongodb 1.4 extension over to using streams. He also talks about some of the things coming in the 1.5 version including progress reporting for read/write actions.

Paul Reinhemier has written up post sharing his creation of the code to get XHGui working with MongoDB.

Mark Story & I are pleased as punch to introduce XHGui on MongoDB. Our goal was to get as close to the original feature set of the tool I worked on a few years ago (which leveraged the starting point provided by Facebook) and then to release what we had. What we’ve got now works; there’s still a good distance to go, but we think it’s far enough that we can ask for help form the community at large.

The tool collects XHProf data and stores it into a MongoDB database and allows you to view recent activity. There's a few warnings that he includes with the post, so be sure to read those through if you plan on using the tool.

On DeveloperWorld today there's a new article talking about performance concerns and PHP application (and how your data source might be the problem).

The power of PHP and an RDBMS is the ability to nail the major features of an application with cheaply paid developers in a record amount of time. Unfortunately, the default runtime environment used by PHP is simply an unscalable mess. [...] The truth is that if you have enough servers and enough database servers, you don't have contention. [...] As it turns out, there's a modern solution to the problem: the cloud plus NoSQL. Cloud infrastructure gives us the ability to spin up enough servers, and a NoSQL database enables us to shard our data effectively.

They talk some about why they think PHP's runtine environment is "a dog" based on the non-native pooling of database connections and the lack of a thread-safe environment.

The bottom line: PHP applications are a load on the database due to the constraints of the concurrency model.

He points to the cloud architecture and NoSQL databases as solutions to the scalability problem, providing more scalable resources and flexible data sources.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial today for those wanting to get into the MongoDb document-driven (NoSQL) database but haven't known where to start. This tutorial walks you through some of the basics including setup and configuration of both the server and PHP client side.

There are a lot of implementations of the NoSQL concept, but one of the most famous and widely used NoSQL databases is MongoDB. I think it’s one of the most interesting NoSQL databases available currently, and it’s considered by many to be one of the easiest to use (which has helped it gain widespread adoption). In this article I’ll introduce you to NoSQL with MongoDB. You’ll learn how to install the MongoDB extension for PHP, and how to add, update, and retrieve document objects.

He starts with an introduction to MongoDB and links to their site to grab the latest version of the database. A few simple steps later (including a call to install the mongo PECL module) and your PHP install is ready to go. Code snippets are included showing how to connect to the server and insert/update/select document records.

Christian Schaefer has a recent post pointing out a common frustration among developers of applications with NoSQL backends, specifically with Doctrine, MongoDB and PHP DateTime objects - timezone conflicts.

I really like Doctrines way of dealing with dates and times. Instead of passing timestamps around or strings with ISO date format it simply makes use of the PHP native type DateTime which provides all you really need to work with. PHPs interface to MongoDB however comes with its own MongoDate type which provides hardly any functionality compared to DateTime and it’s not compatible with it. So what’s the difference?

In some of the comments to the post, readers mention that the problem is bigger than just the tools used to work with the database, it's that databases usually don't care about timezones when working with date/time. There's also an interesting mention further down about the timezone support MongoDB does have and an example snippet ofo code that uses the support.

On the php|architect blog today Bill Karwin has shared his thoughts on NoSQL and how, despite the popularity of it during 2010, the hype curve is bending and companies are realizing it's less of the "silver bullet" they expected.

The technology hype of 2010 was clearly NoSQL, which proved to be more of a brand-name than a technical term. Today in his tech blog, Bozho set out his view that NoSQL is probably not a good choice for startups that don’t know yet where their database and application bottlenecks are.

Bill agrees, noting that the adoption of NoSQL technologies caused some major meltdowns when all things weren't properly considered. He points out that "a little knowledge is dangerous - the more little, the more dangerous" and developers should seriously consider the impact a NoSQL environment should have before jumping in head first.

New from the Ibuildings techPortal there's this article from Paul Matthews about using MongoDB in PHP applications. It's an introductory level tutorial that uses the MongoDB extension for PHP to interface with a local database.

This tutorial will show you how to incorporate MongoDB into new or existing object-oriented applications, by showing how to interact and integrate with applications and how to deploy applications using MongoDB. [...] If you’ve implemented MongoDB into many of your systems, then maybe this tutorial will, open your eyes on a new way of integrating it. Whatever your background, if you understand object-orientation and want to start using MongoDB, then this tutorial is for you.

He links you to the resources you'll need to get things set up - the extension and a MongoDB - as well as some "first steps" creating a sample Link and LinkPeer objects. There's code examples of how to pull in collections, insert data back into the database and update/delete too. You can grab the full source of his examples from his github account.

On the Juhana Rasanen's blog today there's a new tutorial showing you how to use the popular NoSQL database MongoDB with an application written in the CodeIgniter framework.

Considering using MongoDB instead of a SQL DB in your next CodeIgniter project? Well, we were and decided to take a stab at it, and fairly soon discovered that it is pretty straightforward. Even more so, if you don’t try to use CI Active Record, but use native PHP Mongo interface to store and query your data. That suits our case, as we are planning to access the data mostly from Javascript UI over Ajax - in which case it is quite simple to just get the document from Mongo as an array and then serialize it to the UI using PHP JSON functions.

He talks about his extension of CI_Session to handle the session management and user authentication pulled from the MongoDB and used as normal in your application. He's made the package available for for download if you'd like to see how its implemented (there's a README for installation instructions).

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article from Vikram Vaswani about what's becoming a more popular pairing of technologies in PHP applications - using MongoDB with PHP.

In this article, I'll introduce you to MongoDB, one of the new generation of schema-less database systems that is quickly gaining the attention of open source developers. Over the next few pages, I'll guide you through the process of getting started with MongoDB, showing you how to install it, set up a data store, connect to it and read and write data using PHP.

He shows you how to get your full environment set up - a local install of MongoDB and the PHP shared object to interface with it - as well as plenty of code examples to get you pointed in the right direction. He also shows a bit of how to use the Morph PHP library to interface with the database.

On the DealTaker blog there's a recent post aiming to help you make the transition between a more traditional MySQL relational database structure over to one of the currently popular NoSQL databases MongoDB.

OK I'm going to assume you know what MongoDB is, so I'm not going to go over “what mongoDB is” or “what NoSQL is”. I'm going to do this series in a little different styling than my other tutorial series have been, so let just jump right in.

He links you to two resources, getting Mongo installed and the extension for PHP that you can use to connect your applications to it. After that, it's all code examples showing a side-by-side comparison of the MySQL version and the MongoDB version of everything from connecting to the database out to some more advanced queries.