Rob James has a new post looking at configuring Apache to run Tomcat and PHP together so you can have both Java and PHP apps running through the same Apache frontend.

Version 0.9.0 of the Apache Solr extension has just been released.

The Apache Solr extension is an extremely fast, light-weight, feature-rich library that allows PHP developers to communicate easily and efficiently with Apache Solr server instances using an object-oriented API.

It effectively simplifies the process of interacting with Apache Solr using PHP.

Those familiar with configuring Apache and PHP to run together, have
been introduced to the idea of Apache’s Multi-Processing Modules (MPM).
Basically Apache2 allows you to use different methodologies in how it
manages the various connections coming in. One of the more efficient
methods uses threads; however, when running PHP you’ve been restricted
to using the prefork MPM module since some extensions are not written in
a way that will enable work in thread safe mode.

By way of my favourite Bulgarian / Canadian / American / Web Ninja Stoyan Stefanov, and Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance Team I’ve been studying the fine work found in their best practises guide for speeding up websites. As a recluse who prefers hiding behind servers rather than dancing around your web browser’s canvas, I was intrigued with their server side recommendations — however sparse they may be. In particular, flushing generated head content early to speed up overall page delivery and rendering time was a technique new to me.

p. Royal Pingdom recently published an article titled “What the Web’s most popular sites are running on” evaluating seven”supersites” – TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo and Alexaholic – on the web and the technologies that back them.

p. Sams publishing has release 4 “Phrasebooks” for developers. They were kind enough to send me copies for review. Come on inside and kick your shoes off. Let’s talk about these 4 books for a while shall we?

There are three kinds of people: The ones that can count, and the ones that cannot. Ok, that did not [...]

p. Ok, if the Underground Oracle Manual was just to technical for you (that’s a joke son, I say a joke) then phish tank has boiled it down to the essential steps.

Welcome back to the third edition of "a week in phpworld" – my subjective view at the highlights that happened last week in the phpworld. Covering everything from PHP 5.1.3 and PHP 6 through frameworks, conferences, databases and the rest of the PHP community.