Pro PHP presents experienced developers with a thorough guide to the language's key advanced features, focusing on both recent and emerging features and development trends. Advanced object-oriented features, documentation, debugging, software patterns, and the Standard PHP Library are just a few of the topics covered in extensive detail. Author and noted PHP expert Kevin McArthur also examines emerging practices and trends such as the MVC architecture as applied to PHP, with special emphasis placed upon the increasingly popular Zend Framework. The book also covers JSON, the SOAP extension, and advanced web services topics.

Pro PHP Application Performance will help you understand all the technologies and components which play a role in how well your applications run. When seconds can mean the difference between retaining a user and losing a user, it's important for all of us to have optimization as part of our project roadmap. But what components within your application should you analyze? How should you optimize? And how can you measure how well your application is performing? These are some of the questions that are answered in this book. Along the way you will also learn the "why" of optimizing. You’ll discover why you should optimize a specific component, why selecting one function over another is beneficial, and how to find and use the optimization tools available to the open source community. You’ll also learn how to deploy caching software as well as web server software. Pro PHP Application Performance will also teach you more advanced techniques, such as: • Using Xdebug to profile functions that are not running as efficiently as possible. • Comparing opcode executed by different PHP functions to narrow the search for functions that run efficiently. • Using strace to analyze Apache while your application is served to the user. Once you complete this book you will have a complete sense of where to start optimizing and, most importantly, have the tools which allow you to continue optimizing in other PHP applications going forward.

This work discusses what Web Services are, how they are important in enterprise computing today and the various standards and programming models to building Web Services using PHP.

If you are a web programmer, you need to know modern PHP. This book presents with many new areas in which PHP plays a large role. If you want to write a mobile application using geo-location data, Pro PHP Programming will show you how. Additionally, if you need to make sure that you can write a multilingual indexing application using Sphinx, this book will help you avoid the pitfalls. Of course, Pro PHP Programming gives a thorough survey of PHP post-5.3. You'll begin by working through an informative survey and clear guide to object-oriented PHP. Then, you'll be set for the core of the book on modern PHP applications. Now, you'll be able to start with the chapter on PHP for mobile programming and move on to sampling social media applications. You'll also be guided through new PHP programming language features like closures and namespaces. Pro PHP Programming deals with filtering data from users and databases next, so you'll be well prepared for relational and NoSQL databases. Of course, you can also learn about data retrieval from other sources, like OCR libraries or websites. Then the question of how to format and present data arises, and in Pro PHP Programming, you'll find solutions via JSON, AJAX and XML.

Model View Controller (MVC) is becoming the definitive architecture of website development frameworks due to the stability, extensibility and predictability it lends to development. It is not just the primary separation of database, business logic and interface components, but includes a wide range of considerations for building high-performing, scalable and secure applications. Deciding which MVC framework best suits the project you are about to begin is one of the biggest challenges you'll face as a developer. If you are part of a team, this decision has probably already been made for you; but in any event, you'll need to know how (and why) the framework authors made it work the way it does. Pro PHP MVC looks at the building blocks that make any good MVC framework, and how they apply to PHP. It exposes all considerations that many developers take for granted when using a popular framework, and teaches you how to make the framework your own. Over the course of reading this book, you will learn the theoretical implications of the choices you would make when writing your own MVC framework, and how to put the pieces together in a cohesive package. We take a look at the highly modular Zend Framework—how to use its collection of loosely coupled classes to build a unified system. We also look at CakePHP, learning from its automated build system (Bakery) and highly intuitive approach to rapid development. This book will lay bare all the secret parts of MVC for you.

PHP is experiencing a renaissance, though it may be difficult to tell with all of the outdated PHP tutorials online. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how PHP has become a full-featured, mature language with object-orientation, namespaces, and a growing collection of reusable component libraries. Author Josh Lockhart—creator of PHP The Right Way, a popular initiative to encourage PHP best practices—reveals these new language features in action. You’ll learn best practices for application architecture and planning, databases, security, testing, debugging, and deployment. If you have a basic understanding of PHP and want to bolster your skills, this is your book. Learn modern PHP features, such as namespaces, traits, generators, and closures Discover how to find, use, and create PHP components Follow best practices for application security, working with databases, errors and exceptions, and more Learn tools and techniques for deploying, tuning, testing, and profiling your PHP applications Explore Facebook’s HVVM and Hack language implementations—and how they affect modern PHP Build a local development environment that closely matches your production server