Development on websites when the product will run on a Varnish'ed' production environment can be a pain in the ass. The xml tag that can be used to define Edge Side Includes can't be parsed by a standard browser. While developing you often look at a half rendered website implementation. This is something you really don't want!

Varnish’s Edge Side Includes are a powerful tool that give developers a lot of flexibility. Bas de Nooijer has written an interesting blog post on how to control them from within your Zend Framework application.

Both Don Raman and Ruslan Yakushev have posted about the latest release of the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft for Windows-based PHP installations.

Don comments:

Joey Rivera has written a tutorial that explains what caching means, why it’s important to use, and demonstrate a few different examples. Even though Zend_Cache is being used, the examples are not implementing the Zend Framework so users not familiar with the framework can still follow. The examples will cover how to cache a variable, a recordset from a database query, and an entire page. It briefly mentions the different caching backends but focuses only of the ‘File’ backend.

As the GUI of Zend Server is based on the open-source Zend Framework, you can easily extend it. This article demonstrates how to integrate new functionality to Zend Server which makes it possible see the content and some meta information of cached items.

For this example I use the Data Cache API from Zend Server, but in combination with the Zend Framework component Zend_Cache and its Zend_Cache_Backend_ZendServer_Disk backend adapter.

On his blog, Stas Malyshev (Core Contributor to PHP and Zend Employee) has posted a list of PHP Performance tips that he wants novices to know about. He realized that while he had previously panned a post by Google about PHP Performance of having lots of incorrect or misleading information, but that he never gave good substitute advice himself.

Pascal Opitz has implemented a caching pattern for models using Zend_Cache and the __call magic method. The goal of this pattern was for the model to be able to return calls either uncached or cached, without initializing a cache object every time, and allowing for an easy way to switch between the two in the controller.

Did you know that Zend Server not only has it’s own PHP accelerator built in (like APC). But that it also has similar functionality allowing for caching of data in shared memory? Shahar Evron, Project Manager of Zend Server, has written a white paper describing just how exactly to use this to good effect.

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the many key features of Zend Platform is caching. In a nutshell, Zend Platform caches PHP scripts and content in a byte-code format to improve performance. This is an extremely useful feature, especially when you start exploring frameworks like Zend Framework or Cake. Zend Platform has many dials and controls which affect caching on the IBM i. We are going to explore how a few of them work and shed some light on their purpose.

On his blog Terry Chay discusses how to handle keeping data consistent in your application, avoiding clobbering data and stampede effects, through the use of a locking mechanism, PHP, and Memcached.