In the past couple of weeks I had to implement parallel processing with PHP twice. Since it was very effective I thought I'd share it with you all.

The idea of parallel processing is when you take an atomic transaction or operation called a 'process' and run a couple of those at the same time. Many programming languages support this via threading or forking. Since most computers have multi core CPU's and can handle multiple processes at the same time your application can benefit from having multiple transactions running at once.

With more than 1 million visitors a week Kieskeurig.nl is the largest dutch product comparison platform. Kieskeurig allows users to do a product and or price comparison on almost any type of product on the (Dutch) market. Users are able to review and rank both products and shops. Its main goal is to help other users to make the right purchase. Kieskeurig recently launched their renewed website.

If you're familiar with the site you'll notice the difference immediately. Not only the design has changed but also the interface got many improvements. The new interface is more consistent and well-organized.

The opening keynote was from the Magento guys. Actually Zak Greant should've presented his talk "Age of Literate Machines" but unfortunately he couldn't make it.

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform built on top of Zend Framework. Magento is very well architected - maybe sometimes a bit over-architected - and very promising. It has a modular approach and allows developers to build extensions and add functionality to it. Although the project is relatively young it has a big community and loads of (community) extensions available. The licensing allows you to use it in both commercial as open-source products. It even has an iPhone interface so who needs more

Finally after more then six months of rescheduling my exam appointments I had the time to do some proper preparation and took the test.
Getting your MySQL developer certificate means that you have to go through two tests. Each of them has 70 multiple choice questions. Both tests will take up to a maximum of 90 minutes.

At Ibuildings we use MySQL a lot. Being a PHP developer you're not always focused on advanced MySQL features. Especially with MySQL 5.0 you can benefit from using those advanced features. Often a developer prefers not to rely on database specific code and tries to resolve this in the application logic. Implementing MySQL's advanced features can benefit you and your users.

There is lots of information available on how to build scalable web applications. I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of how we at Ibuildings build scalable web applications.

Often we're dealing with large applications that need to scale very well. Sometimes this is due to high load/traffic but, it can also be that the web application is used in many ways. For example an application can have a heavily used CRM like back-end system. The front-end website uses the same system to publish information from it. You can imagine that if you didn't set it up correctly and the load increases on the back-end, it affects the website users and vice versa.

This weekend I did a short research for a consultancy job in the UK regarding PHP on Windows. Since I am more of a Linux guy I don't follow the Windows developments on a daily basis. It seems like a coincidence: Microsoft released their fastCGI implementation just a couple of days ago. The announcement is covered on many sites including IIS.net and Devzone.

More and more websites are using PHP sessions. In my opinion session support is one of the coolest features of PHP. HTTP is in its nature a stateless protocol and with PHP sessions you are able to preserve data across subsequent requests. With PHP sessions you can easily maintain state in your web-application. For example a PHP session is a good place to store a user's shopping cart or user data like name and address when a user logs in.