Abhinav Singh has a new post to his blog that looks at using a powerful tool, memcached, with PHP to create a simple queue system that could be reused just about anywhere.

Memcached is a scalable caching solution developed by Danga interactive. One can do a lot of cool things using memcached including spam control, online-offline detection of users, building scalable web services. In this post, I will demonstrate and explain how to implement fast scalable queues in PHP.

He starts with an overview of what the queue will let you do - save data into the queue with a unique identifier and pull it back out based on the key requested (and is removed from the queue). The code sets up the connection to the memcached server and gives you methods to check if the queue is empty and to push and pull records in and out. A bit of sample code illustrates how to put it to use.

On the Blue Parabola blog Matthew Turland has written up a post about a PHP something that might need a bit more love - the Standard PHP Library.

If any PHP extension is underrated, it's probably the SPL (Standard PHP Library). From what I can tell without having been involved in its development, its purpose is somewhat similar to the STL. A while back, it was useful mainly for allowing class instances to be iterable and simulate array access. [...] Using the SPL classes actually turned out to be pretty straightforward once you got your hands on a good starting guide or two to help you beat the learning curve.

He mentions a few of the things offered by the SPL like the SplFixedArray/SplFastArray, Iterators, SplDoublyLinkedList, SplStack and SplQueue (among others). He also includes some benchmarks running standard code (like normal arrays) against a SPL counterpart - the SPL side beat the normal side hands down. Check out the full post for all of the numbers and comparison types.

Continuing on his his series looking at improvements in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release, Johannes Schluter uses this new post to look at some of the new data structures their update will have to offers in the Standard PHP Library.

In the programming world there are quite a few well understood and explored data structures. Which are commonly used in tons of applications, still the only things PHP offered till 5.3 in regards to structuring data were arrays (more precise: hash tables) and objects. So people had to either abuse them for other structures or implement the structures themselves on top of these. Thanks to Etienne things now are changing and PHP's Standard PHP Library (SPL) extension will offer quite a few standard implementations of data structures.

These new data structures are SplDoublyLinkedList, SplStack, SplQueue/SplPirorityQueue, SplHeap/SplMinHeap/SplMaxHeap and SplFixedArray. He explains a bit of what they are and more detail on one specifically - SplFixedArray.

On the Northclick Blog Soenke Ruempler has shared the new name for their message queue software they're developing (see here) - dropr.

Why? When Boris was writing the client angel script he somehow named it "dropr". As we neither got better suggestions nor had any other idea we just decided for this name. Actually the name is a little bit fun because all those stupidR startupRs. But it's nice and somehow our framework drops message into queues.

Check out the project's homepage for more information including installation instructions, methods to download the latest version, some FAQs and a roadmap for where the project's going.

On the Northclick blog, Soenke Ruempler has posted an update on the "message queue" project based on a previous draft.

Some time has elapsed since we wrote our draft for a message queue system written in and for PHP. Now it's time to give you guys an update and working beta-code. [...] You can find the project homepage at https://opensource.ruempler.eu/pmq/. We'd be proud if you have some cool naming tips for this project - we haven't registered a domain yet. At the moment it's temporarily called "PHP Message Queue".

Check out the post for more specifics about the updates/advancements they've made or you can download the current code from their SVN repository.

Soenke Ruempler has posted today about something they found a need for in their group and wanted to create something they could share back with the community when it was done - a Message Queue System developed in PHP.

You'll find a Draft for a php-based messaging system below. We'd be glad if we get some comments from the readers. Because we're heavily using open source we want to give something back to the community and make the message queue system open source. And, yes, if someone is planning something like this or already knows a solution, please let us know, too. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel!

He fleshes out the proposal by describing it in three sections - the problem the need came from, some of the existing solutions the web has to offer (including the Java Message Service and IBM's XMS messaging) and the actual draft of the implementation including the architecture, scalability, a name (none yet) and where they're going from here.