php[architect]

by George Schlossnagle

If you program PHP professionally, there is little doubt that, at some point, you will need to improve the performance of an application. If you work on a high-traffic site, this might be a daily or weekly endeavor for you; if your projects are mainly intranet ones, the need may arise less frequently. At some point, though, most applications need to be “retuned” in order to perform as you want them to. PHP author George Schlossnagle guides you through the ins and outs of profiling PHP applications.

by Wez Furlong

PHP arrays are one of the best inventions since sliced bread—but they are not necessarily easy to deal with when you're writing a PHP extension in C. Join Wez Furlong for an in-depth look at how the Zend Engine makes it easy for you to manipulate hash tables without having to write a mountain of specialized code.

by Bruno Pedro

Caching is an excellent technique for speeding up your application by saving the result of complex operations in memory for later usage. As Bruno Pedro shows you in this article, websites can take advantage of caching on many different levels to attain higher scalability and performance levels—and PHP offers a wide array of caching capabilities.

by Eric Persson

SMS—shorthand for Short Message Service—is the standard used by cellular phone networks worldwide to allow their customers to exchange small text messages using their handsets. Despite its limitations, SMS is very popular with cell phone users—and it has rapidly become a widely-used bridge between the Internet and mobile users. Eric Persson shows you how you can build your own SMS gateway using nothing more than PHP, an open-source application called Gnokii and a Nokia phone connected to your computer.

by Morgan Tocker

Although many Content Management Systems are entirely web-based, there is something to be said for the convenience of a native GUI application that runs on your client computer regardless of whether you have a connection to the server or not. Until now, the creation of such applications was outside of the abilities of many developers, due to the very specialized know-how required and duplication of code involved. Morgan Tocker shows you how can overcome these problems by using that most-often forgotten of PHP extensions—PHP-GTK—to build a fully-functional GUI-based news manager.

by Ilia Alshanetsky

The ever growing popularity of the web is putting a continually growing stress on the software and hardware used to power the common website. In this article, PHP core developer Ilia Alshanetsky helps you combat the growing server loads and increase your web serving capacity without resorting to costly hardware upgrades.