The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode, Episode #5: Side Projects hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost.

In this episode Matt and Jeff talk about how and why you should consider getting involved in side projects. Despite the jovial subtitle, “Getting a little side action,” participating in development outside of your normal development routine is beneficial to you as a developer as well as to your employer or clients. They further expand on the topic by talking about non-code-related side projects such as podcasts, discussion groups, or even writing.

They point out one application that's a good starting point if you're not sure where to get involved: the PHP Mentoring Mentor App. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you like what you hear, consider subscribe to their feed too.

In the latest post to the Dutch Web Alliance blog Bas de Nooijer looks at a handy use of ESI in Varnish as a part of the output for a REST API. ESI (Edge Side Includes) let you handle the caching and reuse of fragments of the output from your application and define different caching rules/techniques for each.

For a project I’m currently working on we are implementing a REST API. Performance for this API is critical, so amongst some other solutions Varnish is used. This was done with minimal effort, as the API already had the correct caching headers. There was a noticeable improvement, however I had the feeling this could be improved much more. I realised I can basically compare our REST API to any website, it uses HTTP in the same way. The main diffence is the content being JSON instead of HTML. Just like most websites, our API composes content in many different ways, for instance ‘standalone’ resources, collections of resources or embedded resources. In a website this would be a clear use case for ESI, so why not use it in our API?

He starts off by asking the question "why use ESI in an API" and compares the ESI method to the more traditional caching rules and handling. He includes two diagrams showing the flow of each handling type along with a brief description of how it would extract and combine the data. With the background out of the way, he gets into the code. He shows how to enable JSON caching in Varnish and the JSON tag information you'll need to include to tell Varnish to do its job.

Jim Plush has released the latest version of his My-Bic Ajax/PHP framework with a few cool enhancements - version 0.6 according to this new post.

The two major features added are JSON client side encoding and network down handling. Client side JSON encoding will allow you to send more complex structures to your PHP script and they can get converted to normal PHP objects. The other major feature is handling network down issues.

For example if your client script cannot get a response back from the server My-Bic will now allow you to define your own network down function or you can use the default method which creates a div on the screen alerting the user of network issues. If there are 3 requests that fail in a row My-Bic disables itself until the page is reloaded. All of those settings are configurable so you can change or override them.

The addition of these two features is definitely a plus for the framework - they provide two more advanced features that any developer can use thanks to the simplicity of the My-Bic framework. Some of the other features of the framework include easy forms, a built-in submission queue, and a bit to help you in debugging your scripts.

Jim Plush has released the latest version of his My-Bic Ajax/PHP framework with a few cool enhancements - version 0.6 according to this new post.

The two major features added are JSON client side encoding and network down handling. Client side JSON encoding will allow you to send more complex structures to your PHP script and they can get converted to normal PHP objects. The other major feature is handling network down issues.

For example if your client script cannot get a response back from the server My-Bic will now allow you to define your own network down function or you can use the default method which creates a div on the screen alerting the user of network issues. If there are 3 requests that fail in a row My-Bic disables itself until the page is reloaded. All of those settings are configurable so you can change or override them.

The addition of these two features is definitely a plus for the framework - they provide two more advanced features that any developer can use thanks to the simplicity of the My-Bic framework. Some of the other features of the framework include easy forms, a built-in submission queue, and a bit to help you in debugging your scripts.