Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for May 10th, 2004
PHP5 XML at 10Meg
Christian has some interesting thoughts, results and code up here, parsing a 10Mb XML document with PHP5’s XML apis. Highlights the trade off between performance and memory use when using DOM vs. Sax / XMLReader.
Personally a little surprised that XMLReader proved faster than SAX. “Pull style” XML parsers are usually implemented by “re-routing” a SAX parser and from a quick glance at the libxml2 source, it seems to do the same. I guess executing alot of callback functions at a C level is faster than executing them up at the PHP level.
New Article: Why Use .NET
It could easily descend into the usual unproductive flame fests of “mine’s better than yours!”, but that truly isn’t the intention of my latest article “Why Use .NET“.
Every platform, framework, and architecture has its own strengths and weaknesses, and .NET is no exception. So, the features highlighted in the article aren’t discussed as if they are unique or necessarily better in .NET (although, of course, most are! ;)), but it should give those who are still dipping toes into .NET some good reasons to dive right in.
Tidy HTML
John Coggeshall has posted this slides from the International PHP Conference here.
At first glance Tidy may seem like nothing more than a nice tool for the pedantic. At second glance I start to think Tidy may be the biggest new piece of functionality in PHP for a long time; one we’re going to be thanking John for again and again.
Take a look at this slide for example – Tidy is smart enough to be able to extract legacy HTML “styling” tags and convert them to CSS. Perhaps that should be no surprise, because the underlying C library originally began with Dave Raggett (father of the HTML tag, among many other things).
There’s also other nice features like the Word 2000 mode which suggest a tool written for the real world.
Where Tidy gets more exciting for PHP, IMO, is it enables conversion of HTML to a format ready for XML parsing. To an extent, that means it’s almost irrelevant what the HTML your PHP scripts spit out looks like – Tidy can convert it (see ob_tidyhandler) to XHTML and from there it can be transformed further with XSLT.
Note there’s also a tutorial on Tidy …
DevNet Resource Kit Volume 7 Now Available
…Volume 7 of the Devnet Resource Kit is now available via subscription from the Macromedia website, and includes the following Flash based extensions:
-FlashHelp Component
-SQL Server Components
-ActionScript Data Validation Library
As well as an interesting article on using Macromedia RoboDemo with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and the past couple of months Flash DevNet articles.
Not of course forgetting a whole host of DW and CF based extensions, articles and book excerpts
