The slides of the eZ publish Conference 2006 are now online, available in the www.ez.no presentations section.

Most notably, the slides of the talk about the recently announced Z platform and eZ application server for PHP are also included. They have been presented by the brilliant Jan Kudlicka and show a graph of the whole eZ platform stack - check out the slides: Future of development at eZ (PDF).

The slides of the talks at eZ publish Conference 2006 are now available for download.

In this new tutorial from DevShed today, they look at a method of accessing a MySQL database that doesn't seem to be discussed as much - mysqli.

All right, I know that you're now saying that's not breaking news, since the implementation of objects is an old programming feature. However, PHP 5 has a lot more to offer when it comes to using MySQL. If you're using MySQL 4.1 and above, the good news is that PHP 5 offers a fairly comprehensive extension, called "mysqli," which allows you to interact natively with MySQL via an object-based approach, aside from taking advantage of the new functionality provided by the database server.

They start with a basic introduction of the extension, including how to perform some of the basic bits of functionality on your MySQL database - connecting, getting host information, and even performing a simple query. They then get into the "real power" behind the mysqli extension, the ability to run multiple queries and handle natively the results of those queries easily. They wrap it all up with a look at using prepared statements with this extension, showing the prepare, bind_param, and execute functions.

On his blog, Padraic Brady has this post on a topic that's arisen from the PHP Developer's Network forums - the idea of creating a community-built book surrounding PHP.

The PHP Developer's Network forums were abuzz today after a member's proposal to write a community PHP book for novice programmers, with sections targeting advanced topics and programmers. The instigator was d11wtq (Chris Corbyn), who on a side note recently released the excellent Swift Mailer library. It's a simple proposal - write a book, and release it in some (or many) formats for free.

So why write yet another PHP book? I think the proposal caught such attention because of the method of writing and the motivation for doing so. And admit it, it's a very intriguing idea.

He talks more about how the book would be created ("a community sourced effort") and how quality of the content would be maintained. Creative freedom would also be engouraged, and some motivations as to why a developer would want to contribute to the book at all.

The eZ publish Conference 2006 took place from June 22nd to 23rd in Skien, Norway. More then 300 participants were able to attend over 40 technical talks, case study presentations and workshops dealing with eZ publish, eZ components, PHP, and more. For the first time, the eZ awards have been awarded by eZ systems to key persons in the eZ ecosystem. This report sums up all the exciting news and events of the conference.

Zend and IBM have announced the latest release of their Zend Cores for both IBM and for Oracle.

Zend Technologies has announced new versions of Zend Core for IBM and Oracle. Both Zend Core for IBM and Zend Core for Oracle can install Apache-2.0.50-Server and work with PHP 5.1.4. Further, Zend has extended database and PHP functionalities with both versions.

Updates to the IBM Core include updates to the DB2, Cloudscape, and Informix functionality as well as updates to the ibm_db2 extension.

Updates for the Oracle Core include changes to the oci8-treiber and support for the Instant Client web applications.

I am currently in Sofia attending the webtech conference. However some of the talks are in Bulgarian which makes it quite hard to follow. (There is translation available, but it is still not easy). So, instead of going to the sessions I finalized some optimization patches for Xdebug. I managed to find and fix some performance bottlenecks with cachegrind. Xdebug usually tries to figure out which variables are available in a specific function's scope by iterating over the op array that is being excuted. However, in many cases this is totally useles as the information is never used in any way. With the patch Xdebug will only try to figure out this information when either remote debugging is enabled, or when the setting xdebug.show_local_vars is activated. This speeds up certain applications by as much as 50%. This patch, and many others, made it into Xdebug 2.0.0beta6 which I just released through PECL. The source code is also avaible through the Xdebug website.