Lukas Smith has posted the second and third parts of his talk with Rasmus Lerdorf - a look at MaxClients and HTTP headers.

As promised here are the two other logs from the recent chat I witnessed. [...] Again I left the logs in their raw original way. Hope they are useful for you all.

Lukas also links to two resources he mentions in the second (third?) log about performance as well as mentioning one of the most useful Firefox extensions for web developers - YSlow!.

Lukas Smith got a chance to catch up with Rasmus Lerdorf (and others in #php.pecl) and "talk shop" about topics including handling large libraries and maxclients settings.

In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).

The IBM developerWorks blog has a new tutorial posted today about using the combination of PHP and Ajax to create a simple chat application (with a database backend).

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Complete code is included (even the database table schemas) to create the simple application. They make the four pages to get it working and call that part of it good. The second part of the article, though, builds on this base and adds a fix for performance issues caused by constant polling of the database by the ajax request.

On the GeeksNotNerds blog today, Zeekay has posted about a PHP and Ajax free chat application he came across - phpFreeChat.

Occasionally I'll want some sort of chat app for a website, and the options are overwhelming unimpressive [...] This is by far the best free chat app I've found. It's so good in fact...it's one of those little scripts you find floating around that begs you to go design a new site just so you can use it.

You can find out more about this free application from its website (including downloading the latest release).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part six of their tutorial creating an Ajax chat application with the help of the Zend Framework. This part of the series focuses on updating the user list for the current participants in the conversation.

Updating the user list should occur whenever the user adds a new chat message or refreshes the chat window. Since we already use the MessageAction() method on our PHP IndexController class to forward such responses to the browser, we'll simply amend it to also return a list of currently online users.

They work through the code updates to make it happen - changes to the MessageAction in the IndexController that include the addition of a few new methods.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Andi Gutmans points out some updates they've made to their PHP and RIA presentation by adding some new functionality to an existing application originally by Padraic Brady.

For our presentation on PHP and RIA (PowerPoint Slides) Stas and I improved the chat application originally written by Padraic Brady and featured in the Ajax Chat Tutorial. We added a number of capabilities to show some of the more advanced concepts in the Zend Framework. You can download the application by clicking this link, Improved Ajax Chat.

Among the updates are things like a seperation of data handling, the addition of logging capabilities (including an interface to the logs allowing searching, etc) and integration with several web services. Also included in Andi's post are instructions on how to get to these new features to check them out and what you'll need to get it all up and running.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the second to last part of their Ajax chat tutorial today. This time, they focus on updating the list of users currently in the chat.

Updating the user list should occur whenever the user adds a new chat message or refreshes the chat window. Since we already use the MessageAction() method on our PHP IndexController class to forward such responses to the browser, we'll simply amend it to also return a list of currently online users.

They start by altering the MessageAction controller to handle the fetching of online users and split out the code to grab the latest messages into a getNewMessages function. They check who is online by looking at the last messages to the queue (not reliable, but about as good as it can get with a stateless protocol). Finally, they update the handleRefresh method to execute the new "find online users" code as pass it on to the output view.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the fifth part of their Ajax chat tutorial series from maugrim today, picking up from the previous parts before.

One aspect of writing AJAX enabled applications is that one can no longer pass off Javascript as an afterthought. If you're intent on creating dynamic web applications using AJAX, visual effects, and funky new age interfaces then you'll just have to start recognising that Javascript is going to be a primary development language.

They show how to create and use the XMLHttpRequest object to grab the information from the backend script using a saveMessage call from a form button. When the message comes back, their handleRefresh function takes care of updating the textarea with the results.

They also include the code to allow user's to change their name on the server via the same interface (and the same controller).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part four of their Ajax Chat Tutorial series (part 1, part 2, part 3) today focusing on enhancing the structure they've already created.

In part 4 of this tutorial we take a look at adding a new MessageAction method to our current Controller. This will expect one piece of information: a new chat message.

Of course, plenty of code is included and they show how to work with JSON messages over XML for simplicity's sake (via an updated IndexController).