Two weeks ago, I went to see an EENT (eye, ear, nose, throat) doctor. I had been having problems with my eyes for weeks. It had gotten to the point where I would have constant headaches, especially after long hours of programming work. If it were entirely up to me, I would have just gone to the optometrist, have my eyes checked, get prescription lenses and be done with it. On my wife’s insistence, I decided to go to the doctor, a real doctor, instead.

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In the previous article we took a look at one possible implementation of the Singleton design pattern in PHP4. In this second installation, we take a look at some possible applications for it.

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I have been doing some recent profiling on CakePHP, the results look good despite the large amount of bootstrap code that it has to run with each request. However, I have observed one thing about the framework that could pose problems on servers with heavy traffic: the bootstrap process loads model class files even if the models are not used in the duration of the request.

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It’s official: Zend has “Partnered” with Microsoft. The official press release is here. When Microsoft “partners” with a competitor (ASP, ASP.NET vs PHP, Zend Core) I can’t help but feel suspicious and uneasy.

Here is a list of competing companies that have “partnered” with Microsoft in the past (first four items in the list taken from a Slashdot posting):

• Netscape
• Palm
• Symantec and McAfee
• Sendo
• Sybase
• Fox Software
• IBM
• Borland
• Sun Microsystems

There are more but these are those that I can remember off the top of my head. Some will note that some of these companies did not have an “official” partnership, but only had Microsoft “work closely” with them to make their products “work better under Windows”.

I guess the people running Zend should read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” and highlight the phrase:

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

I hope, in the long run, Zend does not get added to this list.