In a post to his site Sergey Zhuk shares his opinion on asynchronous PHP and why it's in such demand these days in web-based applications.

Asynchronous programming is on demand today. Especially in web-development where responsiveness of the application plays a huge role. No one wants to waste their time and to wait for a freezing application, while you are performing some database queries, sending an email or running some other potentially long-running tasks.

Users want to receive responses to their actions, and they want these responses immediately. When your application becomes slow, you start losing your clients. Once a user has to deal with a freezing application, in most cases he or she simply closes it and never returns. When the UI freezes from the user’s point of view, it is not clear if your application is broken, or it is performing some long-running task and requires some time for it.

He goes on to talk about the importance of responsiveness in web applications and clearing up the difference between running tasks in parallel and running them asynchronously. He also talks briefly about the use of asynchronous processing on the backend and how it compares to other technology (like Node.js and Go) that have built-in asynchronous processing.

On the SitePoint blog there's a tutorial posted showing you how to create a responsive site template in Spress, a static site generator written in PHP.

You may have heard of Sculpin – a static site generator for PHP. [...] While easy to use and fast to set up, Sculpin’s development has stagnated a bit and the documentation leaves much to be desired. Spress is, in a way, its spiritual successor. Much better documentation, much more flexible configuration, much easier to extend, and just as easy to use with almost the same API and commands.

He starts by helping you set up a basic site to work with on a Homestead Improved instance. Once that's up and running (including an install of Spress) he creates the simple site and starts in on the rebuild of the Svbtle theme. He briefly explains how Spress themes work and then includes the code/layouts you'll need to reproduce the theme. The post includes a screenshot of what the end result should look like in two different browser sizes (responsive, remember).

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from Lukas White showing you how to use the Picturefill plugin (Javascript) along with PHP to make responsive images.

One of the key challenges with responsive web design, and a subject of much discussion in recent years, is how to deal with images. Setting a max-width on image elements enables designers to allow their size to adapt to the page dimensions, but in itself that approach can lead to far bigger images being downloaded than are required. [...] You can use a similar approach [to "source sets" of images] straight away and in a cross-browser compatible manner by using Javascript; one such method is the Picturefill plugin. In essence, Picturefill allows you to specify different src attributes for an image, each image file corresponding to a different media query. Thus

The tutorial helps you create an application, powered by the Slim framework and the ImageMagick extension, for the basic structure. He then grabs the Picturefill library and drops them into place. Some sample code is also included showing how to create the HTML structure for the images and the Javascript to handle the switching.

Anthony Ferrara has posted his latest video in his development-related series "Programming with Anthony". In this latest video, he takes a look at responsive design with a "guest host" Sam Richard.

This week we are joined by Responsive Design thought leader Sam Richard. He introduces us to the concept of responsive web design, tells us a little bit about its history and talks about best-practice and the future of the web!

You can catch up on Anthony's previous videos in his playlist over on YouTube including ones covering encryption, prepared statements and boolean logic.

From PHPClasses.org today, there's a new article describing the combination of a few technologies - more specifically Ajax, Comet, and PHP - to create responsive applications.

This post describes an approach used to implement highly responsive AJAX applications using the COMET approach. It describes in detail how the AJAX COMET approach can be implemented in PHP.

It also discusses how HTTP compression and chunking affect AJAX response delays, as well aspects that may influence the choice between Apache 1.3.x with mod_gzip versus Apache 2.x with mod_deflate for AJAX COMET applications.

Manuel breaks the tutorial up into sections:

• Multiple response AJAX requests
• COMET: Multiple response AJAX request implementation
• HTTP compression
• Page compression delays
• Avoiding mod_gzip dechunking
• Apache 2.2.x with mod_deflate

For each topic, there's a bit of explaination and some links to reinforce the ideas. There's not really any code, but he does link to various classes that can help combine to meet the goal.

From PHPClasses.org today, there's a new article describing the combination of a few technologies - more specifically Ajax, Comet, and PHP - to create responsive applications.

This post describes an approach used to implement highly responsive AJAX applications using the COMET approach. It describes in detail how the AJAX COMET approach can be implemented in PHP.

It also discusses how HTTP compression and chunking affect AJAX response delays, as well aspects that may influence the choice between Apache 1.3.x with mod_gzip versus Apache 2.x with mod_deflate for AJAX COMET applications.

Manuel breaks the tutorial up into sections:

• Multiple response AJAX requests
• COMET: Multiple response AJAX request implementation
• HTTP compression
• Page compression delays
• Avoiding mod_gzip dechunking
• Apache 2.2.x with mod_deflate

For each topic, there's a bit of explaination and some links to reinforce the ideas. There's not really any code, but he does link to various classes that can help combine to meet the goal.

If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about "Advanced PHP Solutions" with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.

PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.

In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.

If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about "Advanced PHP Solutions" with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.

PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.

In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.

The PHPit.net site has posted a book review today, a look at Packt Publishing's "AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications".

Welcome to the first book review on PHPit, which is the first one in the new "Book Reviews" section on PHPit. There are many PHP & MySQL books these days, and more are being released every day, which makes it a hard task to pick a good PHP book. That's why I've decided to create this new section which will help you pick the best PHP books available. I will take a look at certain PHP books, and do a thorough review on each of them. Every review will end with a conclusion and a recommendation.

Overall, the review seems positive, though the reviewer notes that the book seems a bit basic at times. He mentions the basic contents - topics like Javascript, XML, XMLHttpRequest, and browser issues one might come across. Theses basics get you ready for the main two sections - client and server-side development. He notes, though, that unless you're very new to the whole Ajax and PHP thing, you might not learn much here.

The PHPit.net site has posted a book review today, a look at Packt Publishing's "AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications".

Welcome to the first book review on PHPit, which is the first one in the new "Book Reviews" section on PHPit. There are many PHP & MySQL books these days, and more are being released every day, which makes it a hard task to pick a good PHP book. That's why I've decided to create this new section which will help you pick the best PHP books available. I will take a look at certain PHP books, and do a thorough review on each of them. Every review will end with a conclusion and a recommendation.

Overall, the review seems positive, though the reviewer notes that the book seems a bit basic at times. He mentions the basic contents - topics like Javascript, XML, XMLHttpRequest, and browser issues one might come across. Theses basics get you ready for the main two sections - client and server-side development. He notes, though, that unless you're very new to the whole Ajax and PHP thing, you might not learn much here.