ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ (FOSS)

It's been a couple of days since the final PHP 7.0.0 was released. Among the new features/improvements brought by this new version are improved speed and reduced memory usage. So they say. It's about time to find out if this is the case.

It's official. PHP 7.0.0 is here. The most important changes are:

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved Exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
• Secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Return and Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts

The link for the official news item is at http://php.net/archive/2015.php#id2015-12-03-1

To use it in your favorite web development environment, if you're a Linux user (like me), you will have to wait until a package is available for your distribution. If you're on a rolling release (Gentoo forever!), version 7.0.0 is probably a couple of hours away from commit in the portage tree. If you're on Windows (no comment...), grab your binary build from the official Windows releases page, at http://windows.php.net/download/

Exciting days ahead!

It's one of these times that you blog about a new release of a great piece of software. This time, it's Drupal. Drupal 8.0.0 was released yesterday, after almost 5 years of development (Drupal 7.0 was released on Jan. 5th 2011) and it's a great release!

For one thing, Views is integrated into the core. To be honest, I haven't kept up with the latest development timeline regarding this new version, so I'm pretty sure I miss a lot.

It will be great to try out the new release. Drupal is one of the best (if not the best one) platforms to build a website.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead, download and install it!

Click at http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-framework-2015-survey/?ref=cdccd3f2b5a2fe94c0de0aed2bdc495c to vote for your favorite PHP framework for this year.

This is a blog post about why you should dump MySQL (or any forks...) and choose another database for your projects. It is not exhaustive at all, it just reflects my opinion about this database that I have formed so far after many years using it. Many are going to hate this post, many will probably love it. Feel free to comment below in any case. I have blogged about MySQL in the past (read here and here), but things have changed since then.

My (our) favorite browser, Firefox, yesterday turned 10 years old for its 1.0 release. Since the words "privacy" and "free and independent web" have special meanings these days and become more and more important, let's try to keep web a independent place for all and our data under our control. Use Firefox and these goals will come closer. Do not use closed source browsers, like Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera or any derivatives. They might be better (or even worse), but use the only free (as in freedom) and decent alternative free browser, use Firefox!

The news is hitting the web. Debian might be forked in case systemd is the only viable init system in the future. Pay attention to the word viable.

Today I discovered an issue with Firefox. It was a rather annoying issue, since it made Firefox skip its cache and loaded already visited content.

While navigating with the web developer console open (press F12 while inside a page to open, it's a lifesaver tool and a must for all web developers), I noticed that while visiting a site that I visited a couple of minutes ago, I looked at many 200 HTTP status codes for images. "This is strange" is the first thing that came to mind. Pressing F5, it loads the images again, while it shouldn't.

I'm glad to inform the PHP developers out there that the popular Yii PHP framework released the GA (generally available) version for the 2.0 branch. Yes, Yii 2.0.0 is finally here and is ready for production use.

This new version is written from the scratch, using all the features introduced in PHP 5.4, so it requires at least PHP 5.4 -I guess that's not a problem for people managing their own servers- to run, so go ahead, download it and play with it. The online documentation is as always very extensive (start with the Definitive Guide for version 2.0 and then go through the API reference). Beware that the code for the 1.1 branch will not run without changes in version 2.0, you will have to read the upgrade section. That's ok by me (breaking the backwards compatibility) if the new version brings many new features.

Kudos to the Yii core (and non-core) developers that helped in creating the new version. Great work guys!

A few months ago, I did some tests regarding the memory usage of PHP 5.4 with and without Xcache, compared to 5.3. You can read the article here. My conclusion at the time is that version 5.4 indeed dropped the memory footprint by a great deal and that by itself is a huge improvement.

This time, I thought of comparing all current major stable branches of PHP, in terms of speed and peak memory usage. So, I'm comparing the latest (as of now) versions of PHP 5.3.27, 5.4.22 and 5.5.6. This time, I'm looking for numbers with regard to speed and peak memory usage, without using any accelerator (like Xcache, APC, etc.).