"One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster."

The idea of that talk is to go through the classes of vulnerabilities or security problems that you usually need to take care of yourself and look at the Zend Framework to check what internal protection ZF offers and how they are used and what problems you still need to solve on your own.

http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2009/10/13/secure-programming-with-the-...

The @ “operator” in PHP is used to silence any warnings or errors that would otherwise be shown (in the browser or the log). Some people thinks it is really useful, the most suggest to avoid it.
This is an interesting blog post about the slowness of @ , one more reason to avoid hiding errors.

http://bit.ly/MVFC9

There are many things you can do to speed up your website. This article focuses on practical things that I used, without any spending money on additional hardware or commercial software.

http://tr.im/xs6y

• Cache PHP output
• Create turbo charged storage
• Leave heavy processing to cronjobs
• Optimize your database
• Save some bandwidth
• Store PHP sessions in your database

About PHP sessions and DB usage I would like to add something: do not use them unless you really need them! Start php sessions and open db connections when needed. Do not put them in the boostrap/frontend file.
HTTP is stateless, try to keep your site/application the same, it makes caching and load balancing a lot easier.
In some context, site content related to user sessions can be loaded using ajax. And DB data can be cached into memcache.

You may also consider stracing your web processes to optimize disk usage. E.g. your Apache could be configured to look for index.html and index.htm everytime the homepage is called. See DirectoryIndex.

I was just reading this and thinking about a possible solution to achieve unique IDs for objects in PHP.

Since spl_object_hash() returns an md5 hash of the internal pointer of an object an php reuses pointers you might wonder how to have unique IDs through your application. Well we still have microtime() and time goes forward never backward ;-)

Today I decided to give php 5.3 a run on my laptop, in particular I was interested to test a closure for the case below.

First of all I am running on a fancy Linux Mint where there's no official 5.3 package for php so I took the 'compile way' following the clear instructions from Brandon (thanks!). It has been a while since a compiled php and I must say that debian pre-packaged libraries has made the task quite simple and panicless.

phpa is an interactive command line shell for PHP.

It is a replacement for the interactive mode of the PHP interpreter (php -a), hence the name.

Google launched their Google App Engine (GAE) a year ago. The free hosting in App Engine is allocated 500 MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Also, if you really want more you can see pricing plans.

GAE will support Java going forward. Unfortunately PHP support on the App Engine is still left as the top item in the wishlist.

Zend Technologies has built an application server for PHP that it hopes can slowly convert frustrated Java programmers as well as those relying on Java on the web and in the enterprise.

On Tuesday, the company is expected to unveil the Zend Server, a paid-for PHP stack that comes with service agreements and support and the free Zend Server Community Edition.

With the controllable jQuery Progress Bar, writing a form upload progress bar seems like a piece of cake now. Hypothetically, all we need is to create the bar, poll for the progress of the file upload, derive the new progress bar value (in percentage) and set it.