Andrei Zmievski has written a new post about a new extension he's worked up (out of curiosity for the technology) - the pecl/bloomy extension.

A Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure that can be used to answer a simple question, is the given element a member of a set? Now, this question can be answered via other means, such as hash table or binary search trees. But the thing about Bloom filters is that they are incredibly space-efficient when the number of potential elements in the set is large.

The filters allow false positives with a defined error rate - it gives the "yes" or "no" answer based on the content and you, the developer, decide if that answer falls within a rate that's okay for you and your app. The filters also take the same amount of time to look up items no matter how many are in the set.

He includes an example of the extension in use - defining the number of elements, the false positive allowance and adding/searching data and how the responses would come back from the checks.

As mentioned by Ivo Jansch, Andi Gutmans (of Zend) responded to the recent speculation about a buyout of the company in his keynote address at this year's php|tek conference:

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

The Internet Super Hero blog happily notes that the PHP community thinks that "mysqlnd is awesome" and was one of the most desired features to be included in PHP 5.3.

Thanks everybody for your trust in mysqlnd and your support! We shall try not to disappoint you in the future and continue with the development. Of course, as the core feature mature more and more, we will try to spend time on implementing new, useful tricks and try to provide you with additional documentation, if time permits.

They also include a link to a forum entry from Jurgen Krieger who ran some tests via XDebug and determined that connection times dropped, query times dropped and there was less memory consumption overall gaining an average boost of 1000ms from a page.

In his latest, Jacob Santos asks the question more and more people are wanting to know - why hasn't SDO really taken off?

Developers will eventually start using it, it will take some time to go from the PHP way to SDO way. It would be easier to jump into SDO once better, more easily interpreted and simple to understand tutorials, code samples, and support is available. IBM tutorials are a little bit technical, with words and complex pictures (UML). Just give me code and explain how it works and let me run with the SDO scissors in my hand.

He talks about the contributions that both Zend and IBM have made to the effort and the lack of features (well, the duplication of current PHP features - XML and database functionality). He has a positive outlook for the overall future of the project, stating that:

I'm quite sure that enough PHP developers are going to embrace SDO in the coming years depending on the coverage it gets that IBM and Zend's investment will pay off in the end.

Several weeks ago I recieved a copy of Pro PHP GTK by Scott Mattocks in the mail. The first surprise, upon opening the package, is that the book is a hardback - a first for me (at least, for a tech book). I assume this is the norm for all APress books these days, which is very cool as the cover price didn't seem to be inflated because of it.

He takes you through a quick tour of the book, mentioning the introductory chapters, a 'ride' through the world of PHP-GTK2 (including widgets), and an example application.

Davey notes that he wouldn't call it a 'fast reader', but the book is still a great resource and he would highly recommend it. It reminded him of how flexible PHP really is, even at creating client-side graphical interfaces.

If you're tired of spam comments or people flooding your PHP application with junk text and links, you'll definitely want to check out this new tutorial from PHPit.net. It looks at how to integrate the Akismet anti-spam service into your application.

To start off right, you need to know how the service works and what kind of methods you'll need to access it. They show a simple connection to the service as well as two functions to mark something as spam and to mark it as non-spam (or 'ham' as he calls it). He also links to their development page and to the WordPress plugin that performs the same action.