PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better.In the Beginning, There Was Apache and CGIAnd there was much rejoicing.In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf created the “Personal Home Page Tools,” a set of CGI binaries written in C. These tools looked little-to-nothing like the PHP we know today. Embedded in HTML comments, and using ...

The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: https://github.com/sol-prog/threads.In my previous tutorials I’ve presented some of the newest C++11 additions to the language: regular expressions, raw strings and lambdas.Perhaps one of the biggest change to the language is the addition of multithreading support. Before C++11, it was possible to target multicore computers using OS facilities (pthreads on Unix like systems) or libraries like OpenMP and MPI.This tutorial is meant to get you started with C++11 threads and not to be an exhaustive reference of the standard.Creating and launching a t...

A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code.And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am.At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special about the night?I think it boils down to three things: the maker’s schedule, the sleepy brain and br...

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage.In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage:<?php$startMemory = memory_get_usage();$array = range(1, 100000);echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes';How much would you expect it to be? Simple, one integer is 8 bytes (on a 64 bit unix machine and using the long type) and you got 100000 integers...

1. Use PHP only when it is necessary – Rasmus LerdorfThere is no better source than the creator of PHP, to learn what he can do. Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Since then, the language has spread like a wildfire rate in the developer community, incidentally changing the face of the Internet. However, Rasmus did not create PHP with these intentions. PHP was created for the needs of web development. As is the case with many other projects with open source, have become popular, philosophy or even narcissism has never been the driving force. It wa...

We've seen some neat interactive HTML5 infographics before -- but the periodic table, for example, doesn't really care that much about time.Visual representation of time introduces numerous complications. Traditional ways of representing time visually were, roughly speaking, translations of dimension-type, from temporal to spatial; the mapping selected would depend on what kind of temporal relation was meaningful for the particular application. For example, circles represent cyclical behavior; lines represent development; trees represent evolutionary history; and so forth. New media change the...

It’s no surprise they call them trends, become they come and go. Maybe you don’t want to take them with the constant changes in web design you sure don’t want to be left behind, do you?Nobody can predict the future of web design, but we’re already seeing small changes to the newer designs and I bet we all want to be part of the movement. Most of the changes in web design are subtle so we need to focus mainly on the concept behind each trend.We will exemplify every design trend so you can determine for yourself if your designs would benefit from these changes.Typogra...

In C++/CLR (for Microsoft), sometimes we need to convert int to System::String type or vice versa. The simple way is :From System::String^ to int int num= int::Parse(str); // System::String^ to intFrom int to System::String^System::String^ str = num.ToString(); // int to System::String^For all the other data types, similar ways can be adopted....