Benchmarking Zend Download Server

Recently I've started looking into ways that the PHP dev team in which I work can make better use of our Zend Platform installation.

For that reason, the recent Ibuildings/Zend seminar in London on the subject of "Enterprise PHP" was well timed, as it included a pretty detailed run through of a lot of what Platform has to offer.

One feature which really struck me as having the potential to bring performance benefits to one of our systems was the Zend Download Server. Back at the office, I looked into the feature, and ran a few benchmarks. Oddly though, the results don't seem to flatter Zend Download Server.

Fighting Spam and Digitising Books with reCAPTCHA

When I added a comment form to this blog, I wondered how long it would be before I started getting comment spam. Then I wondered if I was flattering myself to think that spam bots would even be interested in my site.

So it's with mixed emotions that I have to admit that right now the number of spam comments I'm receiving is outstripping the number of genuine comments by a ratio of about 10:1.

The time has come to add a CAPTCHA to the comment form.

Zend_Search_Lucene Quick Start

I recently had a spontaneous urge to add a search form to my weblog - this one you're reading right now - and it seemed like a good opportunity to have a look at Zend_Search_Lucene.

I'm really impressed with the simplicity and power of the module. Sadly the documentation, whilst extensive, isn't particularly clear - so here's a quick overview of getting Zend_Search_Lucene up and running.

My php|architect Article to be Published in June

I purposefully didn't mention this here before now, as I didn't want to jinx anything.

But the time has come, and I'm pleasantly surprised to be able to report that my article - named something along the lines of "PHP Tools for Mobile Web Development" - is to be published in the June edition of php|architect magazine.

PHPTuring

A few years ago, as an exercise in Test-Driven Development, I wrote a Turing machine simulator in PHP and imaginatively named it PHPTuring.

I had completely forgotten about it until today, when I dug it out for another look. Truth be told, I still haven't seen a Turing machine done any better in PHP, and apart from a few syntactical niceties (removing closing PHP tags as per the Zend way, neatening up the PHPDoc blocks) I'm actually pretty comfortable with the code.

An Introduction to Tera-WURFL

I recently added a post about Wurfl, a comprehensive open-source XML database of mobile device capabilities. I noted that actually querying Wurfl in a performant manner:

is going to be a non-trivial task, and is perhaps a topic for a further article.

Well, I guess this is that article. It's time to have a look at Tera-WURFL, which is perhaps the most popular tool for querying Wurfl programmatically - from PHP, at least.

Managing Mobile and Non-mobile Versions of a Site Using Tera-WURFL and Zend Framework

This is a quick proof-of-concept I put together after a discussion on how to deal with running a mobile site and a 'full' web site on the same hostname in a sane way, and to transparently route user agents to the appropriate site.