Podcast: Under PHP’s Hood

The folks over at iBuildings recently put up an mp3 version of Johannes Schlüter’s talk “Under PHP’s Hood”. It was recorded at the Dutch PHP Conference 2010. Schlüter describes how common PHP operations are actually executed in the Zend Engine and the performance impact each has. He covers:

• How your PHP script is run: compilation, opcodes, zend engine
• How objects and arrays are stored: hashtables, refcount
• include vs include_once vs require vs require_once
• Autoloading
• References (and why you shouldn’t use them in PHP5)
• Garbage collection in PHP 5.3+

Reuse your Javascript as jQuery Plugins

Christopher Haupt recently wrote a tutorial for the EngineYard blog titled Reuse your Javascript as jQuery Plugins. Haupt walks you through the process of converting an existing piece of Javascript code into a jQuery plugin. He explains how to structure your plugin so it works with jQuery’s method chaining as well as how to create a standalone plugin that would be called like:

$.pluginName('some', 'param');

Optimizing a Kohana Based Website

A question about increasing the speed and scalability of a Kohana powered website was recently asked on Stackoverflow. User Pascal Martin replied with an incredibly detailed response on the different techniques available to speed up PHP powered websites. In his answer he goes into detail about using a reverse proxy, an opcode cache and implementing data caching in the application. He then explains how to profile your application using xdebug and how to view and interpret the results from that. If you run a PHP powered website (doesn’t necessarily have to run Kohana) then I highly recommend you read this answer.

Initializr

Initializr is a simple tool to help you getting started with an HTML5 project. It is built on HTML5 Boilerplate, a powerful HTML5 template created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian. Initializr will generate for you a clean customizable template based on Boilerplate with just what you need to start.

LimeJS

LimeJS is a new open source HTML5 game framework that targets iOS, Android and desktop web browsers. All audio, video and graphics display is done using HTML5 and Javascript, no Flash objects are loaded on the page. LimeJS utilises the Google Closure Library and provides an API similar to that of the Cocos2D library. There is a 7 part tutorial which introduces the different components that make up LimeJS (events, animations, sprites etc). Get LimeJS on Github. Below is a screenshot of a playable game created with LimeJS.