Matt Knight

Zend Framework is a popular MVC framework written in PHP. There has been substantial development on it over the past couple of years, and it is now often used in enterprise environments to power websites belonging to large blue chip companies. However, as a site grows in terms of size, complexity and traffic, the limitations of [… Read More]

Here’s a useful trick I came across a while back for using closures in PHP. For those people who aren’t aware of this, starting from PHP 5.3, it is possible to create an anonymous function and assign it to a variable – we call this a closure.

In the last article, we saw that when it comes to maths, node.js was nearly 50x faster than PHP. This time, we’re going to look at JSON – a data format at the core of several modern technologies such as node.js and MongoDB. You might expect node.js to be incredibly efficient at JSON encoding/decoding, whereas [… Read More]

Node.js has a reputation of being a very efficient framework, and most of the discussions around this focus on its event-driven nature, rather than the engine itself. I think it’s pretty obvious to most that when written properly, an event-driven application can be more efficient. However, what’s not so often discussed is how the JavaScript [… Read More]

Sessions in PHP are handled by the $_SESSION superglobal and several session_*() functions. One thing you may not realise about PHP sessions though, is that natively they are blocking to make them thread-safe. What this means is that once a PHP session is started, nothing else can work with that session until it is closed. [… Read More]