PHP – A Language Implementer’s Perspective
Experiments With the PHP Engine

By Graeme Johnson and Zoë Slattery

In this article we will describe some experimental work in building a PHP engine from existing virtual machine components. We were interested in seeing if we could reuse high performance VM components to create a high performance PHP implementation. We will talk about the process that we went through and what we learned about PHP along the way.

Service Component Architecture for PHP
Reusable Components and Effort-free Web Services

By Matthew Peters

In this article we will survey some of what Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP offers the programmer. We have high hopes that the combination of reusable components, which can be called either locally, or remotely via Web Services, with the same interface will be of interest, and that anyone who works with Web Services may be interested in the ease with which an SCA component can be deployed as a Web Service: a simple matter of adding annotations and dropping the component under the web server’s document root.

Freelancer's Corner
Advice from the Experts

By Elizabeth Naramore

There are plenty of people out there freelancing successfully, and they’ve all learned a thing or two in the course of their careers. I’ve taken a few of these freelancers and gleaned some words of wisdom from them in the hopes that you won’t make the same mistakes they have.[Read More]

Beginner’s Guide to PHP
Introduction to Programming Flow

By Marc Isikoff

Last issue I furthered the introduction to PHP, with an overview of strings and arrays. This completes an early learning point of all the main variable types for PHP. This issue includes a much-needed introduction to programming flow, the traversal through a PHP program with decision points and loops to show you how to weave together the variables you learned.

AJAX Growing Up – Part I
Enhancing the Reliability of AJAX Applications by Streamlining XMLHttpRequests

By Robert-Jan de Vries

Since AJAX has become a mainstream technology for a ‘richer’ Internet, most programmers have successfully implemented it or have at least experimented with its possibilities. As the complexity of AJAX-based applications grows, so does the need for reliability. This article is divided into two parts, each part aiming to hand you a practical solutions to a problem that you are likely to run into on your quest for a reliable web application.

Managing IT in an Open Environment
The Promise of Faster Deployment, Greater Flexibility, and Reduced Costs

By Ranga Rangachari

IT decision-makers need no longer swallow the bitter pill of high-cost, slow deployment and complex management that typifies proprietary IT monitoring systems. Open source IT management solutions are rapidly gaining high-profile recruits with their comparable functionality, coupled with greater technical agility, faster deployment, lower costs and relative management simplicity. Could open source solutions prove to be the cure-all to common IT headaches?