if you're still not using any kind of version control in your development projects, you're really doing yourself (and your fellow developers) a disservice. Lorna Mitchell wants to help nudge you down that road. To do this, she's provided a whitepaper about version control systems - what they are, how they're helpful and some cool stuff you can do with them.

Last week I wrote an email to a client who hasn't yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You're not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).

The whitepaper looks at three different tools - Subversion, git and Mercurial (Hg) - and includes a "sales pitch" you can give to the people involved in your project about how it can help them. There's also a few helpful links included at the end for more information about each piece of software.

The folks over at php|architect have created a white paper detailing some of their experiences with using the SQL Server Driver (v2.0) with PHP and made it available for download.

A while back, our friends at Microsoft asked us to write a whitepaper on how to use Microsoft SQL Server from PHP through their brand-new SQL Server Driver 2.0, which you may have noticed tucked away in a corner of the download package for our September 2010 issue. Now that we’ve had a chance to collect feedback and fix a few bugs here and there, we thought it’d be good to make it available to anyone - you can find it here in PDF format.

Topics covered in the paper include installing and configuring the SQL Server driver, accessing the database with PHP, understanding joins, working with SQL Azure and a bit on migrating from a MySQL database.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a new post from Soila Patajoki about a white papers they've developed covering continuous integration and how it relates to PHP applications.

This new white paper discusses the policies and systems that together make up Continuous Integration. It explains how Continuous Integration can allow your teams to build projects faster and cheaper, and also covers several best of breed tools for PHP-based companies to use to implement such a system.

The PDF download is free, but you'll need to give up a little personal information to get to it. The white papers covers topics like source code control, regression testing and tools like PHPUnit, Phing and phpDocumentor.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today, there's an article from Keith Casey trying to set the record straight on some recent benchmarks put together by Zend and Acquia showing the performance of Drupal.

While I have not attempted to duplicate or validate any of their individual numbers or conclusion as a whole, I have been a Drupal user for well over five years and have launched 30+ sites on it.

With this experience to back him up, he points out a few things about the report that either needed work or were misleading in their results. This includes a limitation on the web server configurations they covered, the statistics on Windows performance (might turn people off to using it on this platform) and the emphasis being put in some of the wrong places - optimizing PHP versus Drupal.

He recommends that, like all studies and whitepapers like this, you take the results as only guidelines and examples, not as absolute facts. There's always going to be differences in hardware, software and configuration so what gave the big numbers and results for them might not work for you.

Mentioned on the Ibuildings blog today is a new white paper (contact details required for download) from Ivo Jansch, the CTO of Ibuildings about creating service APIs for your web-based applications.

Every company starts with a single website or web application, but as a company's online presence grows, many different applications and sites are deployed. With a traditional approach of treating each of these applications as separate solutions, a number of problems occur [...] Service APIs can help you reuse a set of common functionality, which is implemented only once into the service layer. They can also help integrate third party applications in a consistent and robust way, and work around possible performance limitations.

The whitepaper covers the differences between the traditional development model and how the service model changes how you think about your backend. He covers implementation, development, documentation, testing methods and general maintenance down the line.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new white paper (written up by Shahar Evron of Zend) about data caching with the Zend Server product Zend offers.

Did you know that Zend Server not only has it’s own PHP accelerator built in (like APC). But that it also has similar functionality allowing for caching of data in shared memory? Shahar Evron, Project Manager of Zend Server, has written a white paper describing just how exactly to use this to good effect.

Caching is one of the simplest ways to increase the speed of your application and Zend Server makes it simple with its included Optimizer+, Zend Page Cache and Data Cache API tools. For more information, you can download the whitepaper here [pdf].

Ken Guest has posted about a whitepaper that he was involved in editing - the PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper:

As far as I know this is the first full English language translation and update of the work done by the Association Francaise des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP Users Group). Also there is a lot of new content in the Whitepaper that with regards to how PHP is now utilised in Enterprise. Figures have been updated and techniques available in later versions of PHP have been referenced.

He mentions some of the challenges in the translation and thanks a few others for the effort and contributions they made to the project. The whitepaper (pdf) looks at several key topics of PHP in the Enterprise including: suggestions for architecture, integration issues, concurrent use with other languages and how PHP fits into the web application ecosystem.

Christopher Jones has pointed out a new whitepaper that's been published by oracle about the scalability the connection pooling affords for current versions of PHP.

The whitepaper talks about the changes in the PHP OCI8 1.3 extension, explains some of the concepts behind DRCP and FAN, and gives best practices and tuning tips. It includes a new PHP benchmark which shows up to 20,000 connections being handled by Oracle on commodity hardware using only 2G RAM.

The paper also talks about the FAN support that's built in - the ability for PHP to use the Oracle RAC cluster functionality to make for high availability (switching between nodes). The latest beta with all of this functionality in it can be grabbed from its page on the PECL site.

With all of the recent talk about business cases for PHP, Ben Ramsey wanted to get some of his thoughts on the matter out and into his blog in a new post.

I don't believe anyone has ever published any white papers on PHP, giving it a business case, and while we have companies like Zend, OmniTI, and eZ Systems providing support for PHP, I haven't seen any documentation from them like this. So, last Thursday when Google Group for developing a business case for PHP, I took notice and joined.

Definitely good to hear encouraging words about a project that could ultimately help out the language as a whole break into an area where the growth has been the slowest.

With all of the recent talk about business cases for PHP, Ben Ramsey wanted to get some of his thoughts on the matter out and into his blog in a new post.

I don't believe anyone has ever published any white papers on PHP, giving it a business case, and while we have companies like Zend, OmniTI, and eZ Systems providing support for PHP, I haven't seen any documentation from them like this. So, last Thursday when Google Group for developing a business case for PHP, I took notice and joined.

Definitely good to hear encouraging words about a project that could ultimately help out the language as a whole break into an area where the growth has been the slowest.