The worst thing in the world you can do if your worried about performance is use Apache OOTB (out of the box). Using it OOTB is like bringing your whole Snap-on tool chest with you when all you need is a tool belt.

The sad thing is most people don't take the time to pull out the tool belt when comparing Apache with other web servers, but that's a discussion for another day.

Pretty much everyone knows the best way to ensure site performance is caching data when ever possible. Normally this is pretty much a no-brainer but if your dealing with a Multitenant site you need to make sure you always use a per site unique key for most data.

This gets even more problematic if you support third party developers/modules as they have to follow the same rules as well.

One of the nice things about the Solar Framework is the ability to define table layout within the models.. Its not something you have to do but when you do Solar will auto create the table if it does not exist.

This makes development fun because when ever you change a model you can just drop the table and it will get remade on the fly.

Auto create however has 2 issues.. 1. Pre populating data, 2. Table settings outside of Solar's realm (like temp tables).

I was programming my garage door opener the other day and for some reason I started wondering why we don't use "rolling codes" for web security..

The closest most common thing would be "nonce" which in the most generic sense is hash(timestamp + secret), or in some cases to protect middle man attacks, hash(timestamp + secret + parameters)

Noticed a broken link on my site.. The one that shows I am a "Zend Certified" engineer..

Thought maybe they changed how you should be linking to this and didn't tell anyone..

Nope its still http://zend.com/zce.php?c=ZEND001662&r=3ab51cf according to http://www.zend.com/en/services/certification/zce-logo

But that no longer works.. You get sent to the zend store..

Try to look myself up in the "Zend Yellow Pages"... Thats no longer available either..

Sure its a mistake and will be fixed soon...

Ok so maybe "Alert" is a lame name but I really wasn't going for "cool".

My new house gets a little warm some afternoons and I don't always remember to close the windows in the morning to keep the cool air in, or open them at night to cool things down.

What is a programmer to do? Pull out the Solar Framework and throw together a simple solution that will email him when certain conditions are met.

Behold http://alert.cyberlot.net/

Not all frameworks support true models and this is one thing that really sets the Solar Framework apart from a lot of frameworks.

So what sets Solar apart? Lets replicate what Zend Framework references on models in Solar.. You can find the ZF Docs Here

For anyone following this blog I will be at PHP|Tek this year! If you would like to meet up or talk over a round of tequila or good non-american beer send me a shout.

For those that can't make it I feel for you! If you haven't been to a PHP related event PLEASE make time to go and I promise it will be worth it. I always manage to come away with a little bit more knowledge and full of ideas and new found energy.

A lot of articles flying around about the proper way to comment or not to comment code and honestly I feel my commenting habits are something I can improve on so I haven't commented (yea 2 many puns in 1 sentence, you can always comment them out).

Everyone seems to have an opinion but its this article that to me really hit buttons http://www.whitewashing.de/blog/articles/116

This person takes a reasonably sensible and easy to read piece of code and tortures it into twice its size in the name of making it easier to read...

How many of you have used the function stream_get_line() before?
How many of you know what it does?
How many of you know it works with resources opened by fopen()?

What does stream_get_line() do? "This function is nearly identical to fgets() except in that it allows end of line delimiters other than the standard \n, \r, and \r\n, and does not return the delimiter itself."