In this new post on his blog, John Maver gives a step-by-step guide for creating a PHP5 application for the popular social networking site Bebo.com.

I have been answering a lot of email requests for how to get started with a Bebo application. Since applications can be written in any language that supports interaction with the Bebo REST API, developers have a lot of choices in how they build their application. The focus of this article will be on the "officially supported language" - PHP.

He defines the parts of the application first (the callback, canvas page, profile box, invitation and news stories). Much like the Facebook API, the Bebo system has you host the application on your own servers and use their developer libraries to interface with their systems. He makes a simple application that has a "story" published to it that shows to each visitor.

He also tosses in a method for knowing a bit more about the user - like if they've just added the application, if they're a normal user or if they've just removed it from their application list.

Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension