Chris Jones has a new post today showing you how to use Oracle and PHP together to process data offline via the Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing feature.

Offloading slow batch tasks to an external process is a common method of improving website responsiveness. One great way to initiate such background tasks in PHP is to use Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing in a producer-consumer message passing fashion. [...] The following example simulates an application user registration system where the PHP application queues each new user's street address. An external system monitoring the queue can then fetch and process that address. In real life the external system might initiate a snail-mail welcome letter, or do further, slower automated validation on the address.

He includes the SQL needed to create the database and configure the queue system as well as start it up and get it ready for requests. He shows how to push an address into the queue for processing and how to get the results once it has completed in both the SQL and from the oci_* functions in PHP.

In his latest post to his site Chris Jones shows you how to update the Zend Framework 2 tutorial app (quickstart) to make it work with an Oracle database instead.

This post shows the changes to the ZF2 tutorial application to allow it to run with Oracle Database 11gR2. [...] The instructions for creating the sample ZF2 application are here. Follow those steps as written, making the substitutions shown [in the rest of the post].

The full schema definition is included in the post, complete with the same sample data as the tutorial. He includes the updates you'll need to make to the database configuration for the OCI8 connection and changes to the code to accommodate the Oracle data format (mostly uppercasing everything).

As Chris Jones has posted on his Oracle blog, there's been a recent update to the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual with a complete refresh of content from more recent versions of the powerful database.

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual is designed to bridge the gap between the many PHP scripting language and the many Oracle Database books available. It contains unique material about PHP's OCI8 extension for Oracle Database, and about other components in the PHP-Oracle ecosystem. It shows PHP developers how to use PHP and Oracle together, efficiently and easily.

Updates include new content related to the Oracle XE 11g release and the latest updates to their OCI8 extension for PHP. Other updates include information about using PHP with Oracle TimesTen, NetBeans and Oracle Tuxedo as well as getting PHP installed on the Oracle Solaris operating system.

According to a new press release on the Oracle.com site today, they've announced the company's investment in the popular PaaS provider (and big sponsor of several PHP conferences, events and the community) Engine Yard. From the official press release:

Oracle announced today that it has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, a leading cloud development platform that supports Ruby, PHP and Node.js, popular web development languages. [...] In conjunction with this investment, Oracle and Engine Yard expect to work closely together to provide cloud application developers with a greater choice of development and deployment options. The two companies are expected to connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment.

No word yet on how this will integrate with Oracle's own cloud solutions but it should be interesting to see what comes out of it. Congratulations to the Engine Yard folks on the investment!

On the Oracle Technology Network today there's a new article from Rasmus Lerdorf about the current release of the language (PHP 5.4) and what he sees as the future for PHP.

Almost exactly eight years ago I wrote an article for the Oracle Technology Network called, "Do You PHP?". In that article, I talked about PHP's stubborn, function-over-form approach to solving the "Web problem" and the fight to keep things simple. We were getting close to releasing PHP 5.0 at the time. Now here we are almost a decade later with a shiny new PHP 5.4.0 release, and while much has happened during that time, there are also many things that haven't changed at all.

The first talks about what's the same - the ecosystem surrounding the language and the strength of the LAMP stack that PHP helped to "found". He mentions some of the up-and-comers that are alternatives to this traditional setup and some of the extensions that have been added to improve PHP's functionality (DateTime, PDO, JSON support). He talks about other improvements in the language including:

• Better memory management
• Traits
• Short Array Syntax
• Closure binding
• Built-in webserver
• Native session handler interface
• Removal of register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode

He briefly looks ahead at "what's next" for the language and points to the "internals" mailing list and the PHP wiki

On the Ibuildings techPortal today, they've posted the latest in their DPC Radio series of podcasts - recordings from this year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this latest episode, they share Christopher Jones' talk "Developing and Deploying High Performance PHP Applications".

This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment. The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database.

Technologies mentioned include connection pooling, monitoring, caching and suspending/resuming transactions for stateful web applications. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can find his slides over on the Oracle Technology Network.

Chris Jones has a new post today sharing a schedule of a few scripting-related sessions coming up at Oracle's OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences.

Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences are happening in San Francisco next week. It will be a busy and exciting time.

The PHP-related sessions are at OpenWorld this year including:

• High-Performance Web Applications with C/C++/PHP/Python
• Develop and Deploy High-Performance Web 2.0 PHP, Ruby, or Python Applications
• PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl: Develop and Deploy Mission-Critical Apps with Oracle Database 11g
• Extending Oracle E-Business Suite with Ruby on Rails

For more information on the OpenWorld conference (happening October 2nd through 6th in Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA) take a look at the main event site.

Alberto Viana has a new post to his blog about using Oracle ZML Types with a Zend Framework application. He created a custom adapter to create the type and handle the binding/execution on an new OCI8 connection.

So few days ago I needed to insert Oracle XMLtype with Zend Framework. I used oracle adapter to wrote it in Zend Framework. I was looking for and I found on Chris Jones Blog.

His table has a column defined as an XMLType, a special data type specifically for working with XML datasets directly in the database. His adapter includes a bit of sample XML and the code needed to bind the data as a CLOB and, using the writeTemporary function.

Chris Jones has posted a quick note to his blog today about some new PHP packages that are available from Oracle of 5.3.8 (RPM) with one of the latest OCI8 extensions already included.

I've built PHP 5.3.8 RPM packages with various common extensions (and the latest OCI8 1.4.6) for Linux x64. They are downloadable at oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These binaries might be useful for quick testing. They are unsupported.

He points to packages on the ULN site if you're looking for something a bit more stable. The OCI 1.4.6 version of the extension includes a few new features but was mostly a test suite update.

In a new post to his blog Chris Jones talks about a new way Oracle's developed to run PHP applications - Oracle Tuxedo, a web application server with specific support for PHP.

Oracle Tuxedo provides a scalable and highly available mid tier platform capable of managing and integrating heterogeneous applications. This overview datasheet explains its capabilities: "Oracle Tuxedo provides a service-oriented infrastructure for efficiently routing, dispatching, and managing requests, events, and application queues across system processes and application services".

If you'd like to give it a shot, you can download one of their developer virtual machines and give it a look. A tutorial is included inside as well as Netbeans and MySQL.