The Ibuildings techPortal has posted the latest episode of their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 podcast series, a session given by Peter Verhage on handling the ups and downs of server loads and traffic.

NU.nl is a well known news website in its homeland, The Netherlands, and is actively expanding into other countries. On an average day NU.nl will serve up 7 million page views; peak traffic days are more than triple that number. [...] In this [episode] we want to look at the front end that we architected for NU.nl, and how we designed the system to handle both regular traffic and peaks.

To listen you can either use the in-page player or you can grab the mp3 directly.

The Ibuildings techPortal has published two new episodes of their DPC09 Sessions podcast today - one from Sebastian Bergmann and the other from Michal Wittke.

>Sebastian's talk covered the internals of the PHP language and gave a step by step tour though how the code is parsed and executed. You can either listen to this episode via the in-page player or via the mp3 download

The next episode is Michael Wittke's talk in getting PHP up and running on embedded devices like web-enabled cameras or mobile devices. As with the previous episode, you can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

Chris Renner has put together a new post showing how to use the Zend_Registry component of the Zend Framework to make your session variables easier to get to globally from other parts of your application (and standardize their access).

I've been using $_SESSION like this for a couple of years, and I've known the whole time it was a band-aid approach to solve the problem. Such an approach is not an ideal "design pattern." Though it passes my baseline rule - it works - there are downsides. [...] I refactoring my main app with Zend_Registry in place of my rat's nest of $_SESSION['config']['foo'] and such...which is mostly just things like email addresses for the system admin (me) and other global variables that may come in handy in any script or method.

He talks about how storing values in the session (especially configuration settings) is a bit of "Gerrymandered code" and that the Zend_Registry features allow you to completely replace the need for working directly with $_SESSION. To replace his current functionality, though, he still needed to work with the session values. The result? A wrapper class that has methods for getting and setting to make things a bit more clean.

Alvaro Videla has a different sort of suggestion for storing the sessions for your application - use Erlang.

In the last few days I been playing with the PHP extension mypeb which allows us to connect to Erlang from PHP. As a simple example to show what we can do with this extension I will create a PHP class that will be used as the session_save_hanlder for PHP. [...] I will like to try something different by using this class to interact with an Erlang node that will act as the in memory storage for our sessions using ETS tables.

He uses the session_set_save_handler PHP function to point the application to a new location (away from the default filesystem handling) and to a custom ErlangSessionHandler object's "open" method. Also included are "close", "read" and "write" methods that let PHP talk directly to the Erlang instance. Code snippets are included.

New on the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post with the latest recording from this year's ZendCon (2009) conference - Ilia Alshanetsky's talk "PHP 5.3 == Awesome!".

Welcome to the ZendCon 2009 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA and features Ilia Alshanetsky giving his talk: "PHP 5.3 == Awesome!"

You can listen to this new episode in three different ways - either via the in-page player, through the direct download link or by subscribing to their feed.

On the IBuildings techPortal today there's another session from this year's Dutch PHP Conference (2009) - Maarten Balliauw & Kevin Dockx's talk on Silverlight for PHP developers.

This session covers the basics of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrates how PHP developers can benefit from developing rich client-side components that run in the web browser using Silverlight and PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode via their in-page player or get the mp3 directly.

Fabien Potencier has posted some updates to the Symfony blog about the upcoming Symfony Live event (in 2010) related to the sessions, their Training Day and some new sponsors.

Since the last time I blogged about the next Symfony Live Conference, I have a whole lot of exiting news. First of all, because I receive a lot of questions about the language of the conference, I want to say again that the whole conference will be held in English only. As a matter of fact, I can tell you than people from 24 countries have already registered for the conference.

Updates to the sessions include the addition of Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Dustin Whittle. The Training Day will be right before the conference and will have five tracks going at once. Check out the post for more on the updated sponsor listing.

The IBuildings techPortal has posted the latest episode of their Dutch PHP Conference series of podcasts (as recorded at the DPC 2009 event). This new episode is Derick Rethans giving a talk on PHP and D-BUS.

The D-BUS Inter Process Communication mechanism is the basis for many system-related functionality on Linux-based systems. Both GNOME, KDE, as well as the Open Moko Linux computing platform use it extensively for everything related to talking to services and hardware. Skype, as well as other applications, provide D-BUS APIs as well.

His talk gets into the details of the PHP/D-BUS integration by creating a simple script to control a Skype instance and a PHP-GTK tool to talk to an OpenMoko application.

You can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The IBuildings blog has posted the latest podcast in their Dutch PHP Conference talks series - Christian Wenz on Web Accessibility.

Making a web site accessible may require extra effort, but also increases the target audience. The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative released their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 specification in May 1999, and version 2.0 followed almost ten years later. This session will give you a good overview of the concepts, principles and guidelines of the specifications and provides you with a basic understanding of how to create accessible web content.

You can either use the in-page player to listen to this latest episode or download it directly.

Hasin Hayder has a new post talking about the new memcached extension for PHP (memcached from PECL) and how it can be used to store sessions data.

Many of you already know that managing session is a critical task for web applications, specially when you want to avoid I/O hop and also a significant load over your database by writing a custom session handler. [...] This is why a central session manager is very important for your application to scale.

He walks you through the whole process - installation, setting up memcached instances and getting the extension installed and working with your PHP installation. By adding two lines to your php.ini file, the sessions can quickly and easily be stored in memcache instead of on the local server.