The slides from the PHP & Performance tutorial I've given during the Zend's PHP Conference are now up, you can find them at the bottom of my talks page here. To all the people who have gotten up really early in the morning, thanks for attending and hopefully you've found something interesting for yourself during the talk. [b]Update:[/b] Rasmus has kindly pointed out that stripping while drastically reducing the size (basic binary is about 3x smaller), does not actually impact the startup speed in any measurable speed. A quick test with php-cgi from latest CVS appears to confirm this, so unless you want to save disk space at expense of debug symbols, do not strip! Thanks Rasmus.

As you may know PHP 5.2.0 will feature a very capable filtering extension that can be used to easily validate your input via a number of rules which you can find here. What I am interested in hearing is are there any other common types of data collected by PHP forms that would be worth while adding filters for into the extension. My own suggestions would be the phone (US/EU formats) and postal/zip code validators. So let's hear what you have to say ;-) Brief Disclaimer: Consider this an RFC of sorts, the suggestions if widely supported may not get integrated and any additions will need to have the implicit agreement of all the filter extension developers before being added.

Unless you've been living under a rock you probably know that Firefox 2.0 was released today. Although, it seems that someone one on the Mozilla's team is definitely living in a cavern since the official siteis still linking to FireFox 1.5. From a developer perspective Firefox 2.0 introduces a number of interesting features, which are explained in detail on the Firefox 2 for developers site . The thing that attracted my attention was the support for OpenSearch standard pioneered by A9 (Amazon), something IE7 also supports. The nature of this feature allows you to "push" your own site's search into the browser's search list for the searchbox, thereby providing a neat and consistent way to find content for the user. This is surprisingly simple to do as you can tell from the excerpts taken from FUDforum code (yes, the next release will have support for this feature) which you can find at the bottom. The other very handy addition to Firefox (something Safari had for quite some time) is the integr...

There are many instances where you may want to see what kind of PHP settings other people are using and what better source of this information then the phpinfo() page. The problem with finding a reliable pool of such pages is that basic search often contaisn many blog, forum, bugs.php.net and alike entries which area copy & paste outputs from users. This maybe fine in some instances, but what if you just want the real phpinfo() pages. The answer is surprisingly simple. To get the data you need to simply need to search for a element always present on the phpinfo() page such as the "Zend Scripting Language Engine" string and then for a user-agent containing the indexing bot of your favorite search engine. Among the data displayed by the phpinfo() page is a header containing the browser provided User-Agent field, which is always populated by respectable crawlers such as the ones uses by Google and Yahoo. The presence of this value guarantees that the page shown will be an actual page, rather then a copy in...

The 5.2.0 release is turning to be quite an adventure, we can't seem to get the bloody thing out. Hopefully RC6 will be the last release candidate, but given that I've said that about the last 3RCs, who knows... This said, the delays were not entirely unproductive and every time more bugs were fixed and language was generally made better, so it is not all bad. The release snapshots is available here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC6.tar.bz2 (md5: 5a146c08f85d8535c76fe6219281a06e) and win32 binaries will be made available shortly be Edin. As always I'd like to ask everyone to give this release a try to make sure no regressions were introduced and to make sure that your applications can still work with this release. If no major issues are uncovered, maybe, just maybe 5.2.0 in a week.