My article on performance has just been published in Oracle Technology Network, you can read it at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/deployphp/alshanetsky_deployphp.html The article has some Oracle and Oracle httpd (variant of Apache) specific optimization, however for the most part it can be applied to virtually any PHP installation. To those interested in improving the speed of their PHP application it should (I hope) prove to be an interesting read.

Finally got a semi-stable internet connection, a pretty amazing thing during a convention of this size. So, while George is serenading the audience with the wonders of DBXML, I get to do a bit of blogging :-). The conference so far is a great deal of fun, had a chance to meet with many developers from other non-PHP projects, which is quite neat as most conferences I have a chance to attend to be PHP specific. The brief talk on performance I gave yesterday went rather well, with probably one of the largest audiences I've had at a conference and seemed to have gone rather well. The slides, to those interested are now available online (just click "talks" link at the top of the page and scroll down). While for me OSCON is almost over :-(, I got an early flight back to Toronto tomorrow the next two conferences are already in the works. I will be speaking at php|works Conference in Toronto around mid-September and I will be giving quite a few talks at International PHP Conference in Frankfurt in early Novembe...

Came across a rather interesting article by IBM on how to convert IE specific web apps to work with Mozilla. Aside from the obvious, by listing the different approaches each browser adopts it serves as an excellent resource for making a web app cross-browser complaint. I hope they will update article with the other two commonly (relatively) used browsers, Konqueror/Safari (KTHML Engine) and Opera.

With the release of PHP 5.1.0b3 the dev tree has been closed for new features, allowing only bug fixes to facilitate the stabilization of the code for the upcoming (don't ask me when) 5.1.0 stable. This however created a unfortunate situation where PHP does not have a development tree for feature enchantments, so any improvements remain lingering on developer's boxes until development tree is once again available... In the past few weeks I've been doing some work, which involved using parse_url() and cURL extension quite a bit and in the process came up with few improvements. parse_url() tweak [ patch ] This patch adds a 2nd optional parameter to parse_url() which allows the function to return a particular URL component rather then an array. Ex: [php] $host = parse_url("http://www.ilia.ws/gallery/", PHP_URL_HOST); echo $host; // will print www.ilia.ws [/php] cURL improvements [ patch ] The patch does two things; first of all it allows the user to retrieve the request sent by cURL to the server. I...

In the past few years FUDforum has grown quite a bit in both the offered functionality and the user base. However, aside from a few tweaks the layout of the forum has remained largely unchanged. While the current layout works quite well for most people, there is a clear want to update the layout to something more interesting. Hence this contest, the goal being to devise a new better, faster and prettier default theme (layout) for the forum, which would improve the user experience. Aside from a new and improved default template some additional templates maybe included in the stock distribution to give forum deployers greater flexibility as far as appearance out of the box. So, if you have some spare time and would like to help to improve FUDforum please submit your design entries, more information can be found here: http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=26425