Spellbook

The number of implementations of PHP continue to rise and rise. Among those I can list are:

• Recently, Caucho wrote a PHP5 to Java bytecode compiler and built it into their Resin server. There’s not much information, but in the link, look for thread responses by Scott Ferguson, the compiler author.
• The experimental Pint, a PHP to parrot compiler.
• The commercial Roadsend PHP to binary compiler.
• The .NET framework Phalanger, a PHP to MSIL compiler (added 22 Dec 2005).
• The original mod_php from php.net.
• The PHP4Mono compiler for Mono (added 27 Feb 2006).

I am excited about all these implementations. Most computationally intensive compiler benchmarks have shown a 5-10 times speedup over mod_php. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before we see a JIT compiler for PHP to Intel opcodes, built into mod_php…

A more curious question is why there has been so little takeup of these faster technologies. Some speculation here:

• PHP is fast enough? The bottleneck is the database or the network, and not PHP?
• PHP 4->5->6 is changing too fast to trust someone else?
• No formal PHP specification or conformance suite makes switching more risky?
• Not all PHP extensions or libraries are available on other platform?
• Lack of knowledge or awareness? Or are we still in early adopter stage?

Original post by PHP Everywhere - By John Lim

Yahoo has recently released their Design Pattern Libary. As they mention on their site:

Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We are very happy to be sharing our library with the design and development community. This is our first drop of what we hope to be a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns. In many cases we have bundled the patterns with pointers to related code from the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

I had a look at some of the patterns. Navigation, breadcrumbs, pagination, auocompletion… Not quite what i expected: these are user interface guidelines, not coding patterns that explain ways of implementing these guidelines. Useful, but don’t be misled.

The User Interface Library includes libraries for drag and drop, animation and othehr interesting stuff under a BSD license. Widgets provided include Calendar, Slider and Tree View. The widgets don’t seem particularly interesting (there are good alternatives out there), but the attractive thing about these libraries are that they have probably been thoroughly tested on more browsers than I could possibly test on.

Original post by PHP Everywhere - By John Lim