PHP and ASP.NET Go Head-to-Head

"When it comes to Web development these days, you have a lot of options. Many of these methods involve preprocessing—that is, embedding code into HTML pages with special tags that signal to a preprocessor that they contain code, and that it should do something with it. Much like a CGI, this code is then run on the server, and it returns some content, which then assumes part of the shape of the resulting HTML page sent back to the browser. Both the open source scripting language PHP and languages within Microsoft's ASP.NET framework fall into this category; JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Perl/Mason operate this way as well. In this article I'll focus on PHP, the technology Oracle has chosen to incorporate into its products..."

http://otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/hull_asp.html

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

In presentation format, Derick Rethans presents the changes in PHP's object model, object casting, compatibility mode, "strict" coding, MySQL changes, the command-line interface, and much more...

http://www.derickrethans.nl/pres-breaking/talk.html

MySQL-PHP Restriction Fears Unwarranted

"Open-source database vendor MySQL recently initiated some restrictions on the bundling of MySQL libraries with the PHP scripting language. Some observers criticized the restrictions as an example of the fragility of open-source technology, suggesting that the limitations could break the easy-deployment model of LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP). As it turns out, their fears were unwarranted..."

http://www.internetwk.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18700048

Microsoft: Defining the Game

Jeff seems to like Cringley's statement of "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win." A nice statement, but nothing more than a nice statement, other than that, its all incorrect... Microsoft has won in the past due to many factors, and none of them related to `Let them define the game'..."

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Apr-24.html

SimpleXML

Folks, this is breakthrough stuff... 'When people ask me "What is SimpleXML?" I often quip, "XML isn't the solution to all your problems; SimpleXML ensures it isn't the root of your problems!" Those of you who have parsed XML with PHP4, or are currently dealing with XML parsing in PHP4, know that it can indeed be very painful to handle documents with any degree of complexity. You either need to use the SAX approach and write a handwritten parser for every document, or you need to use the DOM extension; which (in addition to its tendency to crash, leak and generally misbehave under heavy usage) involves the pain of processing documents..."

http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-simplexml.php

Self-Replicating PHP

"Doug Ross solves this interesting problem in PHP: to write a source program that, when compiled and executed, will produce as output an exact copy of its source. This is trickier than it sounds, because using the file system or intermediate storage is cheating. I admit I looked at Doug's code with sheer incomprehension, so I turned off the computer and went to the shower..."

http://php.weblogs.com/2004/05/12#a3504

PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 is Here

"The second Release Candidate of PHP 5 is now available! This mostly bug fix release improves PHP 5's stability and irons out some of the remaining issues before PHP 5 can be deemed release quality. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use but people are encouraged to start playing with it and report any problems. Key changes since Release Candidate 1 include..."

http://www.zend.com/zend/download-php.php

Dangers of Over-Engineering

"PHP frameworks are popular. Everyone is creating one. If someone isn't busy writing their own, they are using one. At one point, even I wanted to write my own framework, publish it for the world, and reap the rewards that are fame and ego. But I didn't. Real life and work intervened, and I didn't have time. Never enough time. I have learned a lot about the different frameworks that are out there, and I have learned a lot about the different development methodologies..."

http://www.phpcomplete.com/node/view/51

PHP Encoders: Which one is the best?

"I have a requirement, and that requirement is to find a PHP encoder. There are many out there, including Zend Encoder, ionCube, SafePHP, PHP Code Lock, and probably more I missed. Basically, the requirements for this encoder is more than just an encoder. I would like have it do the following..."

http://www.phpcomplete.com/node/view/8

PHP Popularity Scoreboard

Mar. 2004 count of domains running PHP: 15,528,732 domains
Mar. 2004 count of IP addresses running PHP: 1,343,899 IP addresses

Organizations using PHP

As usual, we'll wrap up with our traditional list of significant organizations using PHP.

CapitalOne, NASA, the W3C, HP, Google, Deutsche Bank, Redhat, Lycos, Cisco, Ericsson, Volvo, Motorola, SourceForge, Honda, Xoom, WinAmp, Sony Music, Vodafone, CBS, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, the US Army, UPI, the New York Yankees, Southwestern Bell, the San Diego Zoo, the Oakland Raiders, Audi, Subaru, VA Linux, Winamp, Duke University, Quicken, The Village Voice, Undernet, Access Micro, Columbus Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, Yahoo, Indiana University, Deutsche Telecomm, Bang & Olufsen, Siemens, Unilever, Philips, BMC, NTT, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Dialpad, BMC, Mitsubishi, MP3.com, the Arizona Republic, Deloitte Consulting, the US Navy, Nokia, Valero, Electronic Arts

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