Derick Rethans, realizing that he wasn't ready to jump back into a full-time position just yet has decided to refocus his efforts on helping make PHP a better place with work on PECL extensions and on internals-related issues.

Instead I will be available to work on (custom) PHP extensions and internals related issues. Extensions are a great way around PHP's limitations and performance issues.

His first project is a QuickHash extension to interface with the popular StumbleUpon and works more efficiently by using more clearly defined data structures. There's no stable release yet, but keep an eye on the subversion repository for the latest enhancements.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog looking at three different ways you can make a POST request to a server - cURL, Pecl_Http non-OOP and Pecl_Http with the OOP interface.

I've been doing a lot of work with services and working with them in various ways from PHP. There are a few different ways to do this, PHP has a curl extension which is useful, and if you can add PECL extensions then pecl_http is a better bet but there are a couple of different ways of using it. This post shows all these side-by-side.

Code snippets are included for each showing a request to the Flickr API. Be sure to check out the post's comments for more great ideas (like streams, the PEAR HTTP_Client package, Zend_Http_Client and other request types without cURL).

Hasin Hayder has a new post talking about the new memcached extension for PHP (memcached from PECL) and how it can be used to store sessions data.

Many of you already know that managing session is a critical task for web applications, specially when you want to avoid I/O hop and also a significant load over your database by writing a custom session handler. [...] This is why a central session manager is very important for your application to scale.

He walks you through the whole process - installation, setting up memcached instances and getting the extension installed and working with your PHP installation. By adding two lines to your php.ini file, the sessions can quickly and easily be stored in memcache instead of on the local server.

In a new post to his blog Alexey Zakhlestin talks about the "rebirth" of the XSLCache extension for PHP, this time as a PECL module.

XSLCache extension for PHP, originally developed by NYTimes started its second life in PECL's repository and I am proud to announce first PECL-release. The XSL Cache extension is a modification of PHP's standard XSL extension that caches the parsed XSL stylesheet representation between sessions for 2.5x boost in performance for sites that repeatedly apply the same transform.

It works with the normal XSL extension with some small differences around which classname to use and a change to the importStylesheet function.

Andrei Zmievski has announced the release of the first stable version (1.0.0) of the memcached extension for PHP.

It's been stable for a while actually, but some people were hesitant to use it in production while it still had the beta designation. Well, no more, go forth and use it.

Future plans include the addition of memcached_dump and auto-ejection support. The memcached extension is a PHP library that allows your application to interface directly with a memcached server. Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

In this new post to his blog about the release of a new version of the OCI8 PECL extension - 1.3.5.

Last week Christopher Jones from Oracle pinged me about a patch I submitted a while back. The patch enables basic Oracle Instant Client detection during configure stage. The patch was meant to simplify install/upgrade of Pecl OCI8 module. After a number of revisions and improvements we have a working test version that will become OCI8 1.3.5.

You can find some details about the new release you can find more details on Chris Jones' blog in a few entries

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswani about using the Spidermonkey Javascript engine together with the PECL extension for it to create a few simple examples.

Not too long ago, it seemed like there was a pretty clear distinction between client-side technologies and server-side technologies. [...] Things aren't that clear any longer. [...] And in this article, I'm going to show you how to add a JavaScript engine to your PHP build, with a little help from PECL's SpiderMonkey extension.

The PHP extension lets you use the libraries (with your PHP 5.3+ installation) to directly create new objects and work with the Javascript like it was PHP. The end result is then passed out to the browser via a "evaluateScript" call. He illustrates how you can use objects and generate XML quickly and easily.

Rob Peck has figured out a way to get memcache (pecl) to compile on his Mac (OS X).

So tonight I ran into an interesting issue this evening in configuring PECL memcache to run on my Macintosh. To give you a bit of background, I use the built-in copy of Apache, but with PHP (current 5.2.8) compiled from source since the version in Leopard is old and I needed some things that it didn't provide.

After finding out the problem (from a log file), he tracked down a similar issue and its solution. Trying it out, he found it worked - adding in an environment variable to tell the compiler with environment to use.

As a part of his work for the WinPHP Challenge Juozas Kaziukenas looks at some of the external library types that you can use with your (Windows) PHP applications.

External libraries are useful for performance demanding tasks where PHP is simply too slow. Also PHP can work as front-end system for various back-end systems (where server doesn't provide any PHP supported communication types). I have written some posts about using .Net libraries in PHP so far, but there are some other choices available too.

He looks at the three types of library choices - PHP extensions, exec call. For what he wants to do, though, the COM objects are the best fit for the job.

In a recent post Hasin Hayder has taken a look at using the OAuth PECL extension (this one I assume) to connect your application's login system with Twitter's authentication backend.

if you are interested in developing twitter applications, you must have read about twitter API and it's authentication protocol. your application can fetch user's private data but it has to authenticate itself as the user for that. so there are two ways to do it: asking user to provide his twitter username and password [...] or let twitter handle the authentication on behalf of you.

This second option is where OAuth comes in. Once you've registered your application on Twitter, you can create a token and send it over to their site for validation. The idea is that, since the user has already authenticated on the Twitter site, they can allow an external application to "share" that login information/process and let the remote application fetch information about the user from he Twitter API.