Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his site looking at using Redis for PHP sessions storage and changes related to the use of PHP 7.1.

In case you have missed it, PHP 7.1.0 has been released recently. Now you can’t wait to upgrade your servers to the latest and greatest PHP version ever. But hold that thought a second…

With PHP 7 lots of things have changed underneath the hood. But these changed features can also put unexpected challenges on your path. [...] One of these challenges that we faced was getting PHP 7.1 to play nice storing sessions in our Redis storage. In order to store sessions in Redis, we needed to install the Redis PHP extension that not only provides PHP functions for Redis, but also installs the PHP session handler for Redis.

When he installed the extension, the latest version (redis-3.1.0), he was given an error message about a failure to read the session data. He shares a bit of code he used to try to debug and diagnose the problem (and a Docker environment) that still resulted in the error. Ultimately they narrowed it down and discovered that it was the Redis extensions causing the problems. Downgrading it from 3.1.0 to 3.0.0 solved the issue right away.

In this new post to his site Derick Rethans about an issue that was discovered with the newer version of the PHP MongoDB driver dealing a JSON encoding/decoding error.

Yesterday we released the new version of the MongoDB Driver for PHP, to coincide with the release of MongoDB 3.4. Not long after that, we received an issue through GitHub titled "Undefined Symbol php_json_serializable_ce in Unknown on Line 0".

The driver makes use of the JSON extension's "JsonSerializable" interface to handle some of the BSON types (like binary data). They were surprised that, despite running their tests on a wide range of builds they never came up with this same issue, compiling them from source. The key here is that the JSON extension is bundled along with the binary when compiled this way however some linux distributions do things differently. They ship it as a separate module and, because this could potentially be missing, a JSON error like the one reported could occur. He goes on to talk about some specific examples from various distributions and the simple fix - ensure the JSON extension is loaded before the MongoDB driver is loaded in your installation. This prevents the JSON handling from being missing and the JSON-related error message from popping up.

Eric Barnes has a post to his site for the Laravel Valet users out there that have upgraded to macOS Sierra. In the post he talks about some of the common issues people are seeing when upgrading either Valet or macOS and how to resolve them.

macOS Sierra was released just a few days ago and everybody is starting to upgrade. Some users of Laravel Valet have reported some problems and Adam Wathan has put together a list of common problems and troubleshooting tips to help resolve issues he’s been seeing.

The list in this post covers a few different topics:

• Interference between Valet and the local Apache install
• Random Valet deaths
• Random files being shown on reload
• 502 Gateway errors
• "fpm.socket does not exist" error message
• "php-fpm.conf is missing" message

The post ends with a list of three logs you can look at to try to locate these errors or get more information about them.

Brian Swan has posted an example of debugging with SQL Server traces you can use in your PHP applications to help figure out what all's happening each time you run a query.

Unfortunately, SQL Profiler (a tool that allows you to easily monitor server activity) is not included as part of SQL Server Express. Fortunately, SQL Profiler is just a nice UI for functionality that is built into SQL Server (including the Express version). So, in this post I’ll show you how to create, read from, and write to a trace file using SQL and SQL Server Management Studio (which you can download for free from here).

He breaks the process down into a few steps with sample code and SQL for each:

• Create a trace (with the sp_trace_create stored procedure)
• Set the events to be monitored
• Filter trace data
• Start the trace
• Read trace data (this is where PHP comes in, code included)

With the results you can see things like read time, write time and CPU used for each part of the query making it simple to pick out the offenders.

In this new post to till's blog, he looks at a method for setting up PEAR on a Plesk system.

Now running any config interface is a blog entry by itself and when I say Plesk, I should also mention confixx and cpanel. And while I have a strong dislike for all them, let me focus on Plesk for now. This is not a copy'n'paste howto, so make sure you double-check all steps involved. With little knowledge, you should be able to to apply all instructions to any other control panel, all you need is SSH access to the server.

The process includes two different sections - why your PEAR installation may not be working and how to install the PEAR packages (on any system supporting a package manager). Command line calls and configuration options are also included.

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.