On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post that talks about source code compilers and a few of the popular PHP compilers to help you optimize your code.

Several PHP compilers existed since many years ago, but the fact that it is actually Facebook releasing their [HipHop] compiler made it a very relevant matter for PHP developers, as Facebook is currently the busiest site in the world that is developed mostly in PHP.

He briefly explains what compilers can do for you (with diagrams) and takes a look at some of the native machine code compilers like Roadsend, PHC Open Source Compiler and Facebook's HipHop. He's also run a few benchmarks to show the performance of the resulting compiled code from each compiler. Some general conclusions are also included like dynamic vs. static PHP, opcode caching and the effects of I/O operations on script execution.

On the PHP 10.0 blog today Stas points out some packages from Zend that are the source versions of the Zend Server platform:

I was asked about PHP going with Zend Server, specifically from which sources it is built - as we don't ship source packages for the builds. Since Zend Server includes PHP build that can have some patches applied from SVN past the release (i.e. if the package has version 5.2.10 it might have some patches that were in SVN 5.2 branch past 5.2.10 tag) - I think it is important that people know what they are going to run if the use Zend Server.

The two packages, php-5.2-source-zend-server and php-5.3-source-zend-server, can be installed just like any other rpm/deb package and will give you full access to the source of the latest Zend Server installation. There's no Changelog included yet, but it should be "Coming Soon" according to Stas.

According to this new post on the PHPClasses.org blog, in the near future India will become the number one source for PHP developers in the world.

The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1. This article presents a reflection about why this growth happened just in the latest years, as well what it means for the PHP world.

They talk about the size of the Indian PHP market and how many developers (certified and uncertified) are out there looking to fill the needs. By their own numbers, the PHPClasses.org has more job openings in India than any other country (with the US coming in second).

As Johannes Schluter mentions in this new blog post, the latest release candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release is now available for download.

5.3 is rather big release including support for namespaces, closures, phar archives, internatioalization support via the new intl extension, improved SQLite support, mysqlnd as backend for the MySQL exensions, impressive performance improvements, ... and tons of other bigger and minor things.

You can grab this latest download over on PHP.net QA site includng both the source for unix-based machines and packages for Windows.

Chris Jones has also posted some thoughts on the new release candidate and, of course, here's the official announcement from PHP.net.

If you're a fan of Planet-PHP (our fellow PHP news source) and have wanted to see how things run behind the scenes, you might want to check out this bit of information from Christian Stocker on where the source has ended up.

After Lukas asked me for the current Planet sources, I realized that I didn't really maintain the sources in the mentioned SVN repository anymore (for various reasons). So I decided to finally move them to GitHub. It makes much more sense there, since the most decent thing to do if you want to set up your own planet is to fork it and git (plus GitHub) makes that painlessly easy. Nevertheless I'm of course still interested in patches.

He warns that the code is a bit on the old side and that the framework its based on has officially been deprecated. If you're still interested, though, you can find (and clone) the application from its GitHub page.

On the NETUTS.com website they've posted a part of their "Dive into PHP" series (part thirteen) cross-posted from the ThemeForest blog (subscribe here). In this edition the vidcast looks at how to handle file uploads in PHP.

By posting short ten minute episodes, beginners can easily digest each lesson, rather than become overwhelmed with more information than their minds are able to consume. [...] In this lesson, you'll learn how to upload files, and how to use regular expressions to ensure that inappropriate file types aren't uploaded to your server.

You can follow along with the vidcast and check out the demo or just skip straight to the source code to get going right away. Links to some of the other video tutorials are also included for things like working with variables, regular expressions and getting started with MySQL.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a new post to his blog today looking at using Phing to keep files in sync on a shared hosting, FTP only kind of environment.

Today I was trying to use [Phing] in shared hosting server, but as you will see, Phing can't do a lot of it's functionality without direct access to server (over shh for example). [...] Things get worse, when you try to sync files in shared hosting environment, where only FTP is available. [...] Code in the hole some months ago posted solution which uses Net_FTP (FTP functionality wrapper) package to upload files to server. I decided to try given solution, so I modified it to download source code from SVN first and then upload them.

His Phing configuration sets up the application, defining the source directory, the files to push, the FTP connection to make and pushes the files over out of an svn export. He has a slightly different solution (no code/config for this one) that would grab the last revision value from the remote server and only push out the files have have changed since then.

On the CSS-Tricks.com site today there's a quick tutorial on changing up the look and feel of your site based on an external source. More specifically, they give the example of updating the graphics of your site depending on the weather in your area via PHP and CSS.

Using a little magic and trickery (read: PHP and CSS), we can change the appearance of a website automatically based on the weather outside, in real time! In the example site we have created, the header graphic will change to one of four different styles based on Sunny, Rain, Snow, and Cloudy.

Their example makes a request to the Yahoo! weather data for a location and brings it in to PHP where the XML is parsed (via a regular expression) and the current conditions are parsed out. This condition is then passed out into the page as the class type on the header and, based on the CSS already defined, the correct image is pulled in as the background.

On the NETTUTS.com website there's a new screencast posted that looks at making a user creation and authentication system in about 30 minutes. The screencast talks about PHP, .htaccess, sessions and their choice for storing user data - an XML file.

Building an entire membership system can be a tedious, and time-consuming task. Tim Cooper is going to show us how to build the ENTIRE thing in roughly thirty minutes. Rather than using MYSQL as our database, Tim will instead demonstrate an alternate approach: using an XML file. We'll be reviewing PHP, .htaccess files, sessions, and more!

As always you can download the source to work with it all locally.

According to this new post from Maarten Balliauw, the latest version of the PHPLinq tool has been released - version 0.4.0.

PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the idea of Microsoft's LINQ technology. LINQ is short for language integrated query, a component in the .NET framework which enables you to perform queries on a variety of data sources like arrays, XML, SQL server, ... These queries are defined using a syntax which is very similar to SQL.

Some illustrations are included - querying an array, performing a database query and finding data in an XML file. You can find out more about the tool and download this latest version from the project homepage.