Today I decided to provide a brief introduction into using SQLite compared to mySQL for PHP and webserver environments.
Traditionally mySQL is first choice when developing a dynamic website with PHP. Recently SQLite is another database system (I intentionally don't call it a database server, see below for reasons why) getting very popular. SQLite has two main usage areas: Webservers (mainly with little performance requirements) and applications.
Zend_Date is a mighty class for handling date and time. As for all of such mighty tools, there is a heavy downside: it's really expensive at runtime. Using a Zend_Date instance a few times is no big deal, but using a hundred instances and generating thousands of ISO-style dates and times may take several seconds.
It's some weeks ago I had the pleasure to try diving into Joomla's component development. Today I must admit: I gave up and began to code my own CMS around the old project of mine that I intended to replace with a Joomla site. Finding out how to code for Joomla is no fun at all, as it is not for Drupal, too.
Saying Joomla development is a trivial task would be a lie. You'll agree to that as soon as you recognize Joomla as a huge PHP Application Framework. And it of course always takes some time to get used to a framework like that. Incidentally that's the situation for all frameworks of this kind, whether it's Drupal, the Zend Framework or whatever software you like. So it's not just a Joomla property and no reason to choose another framework at all.
Today I let you participate in my odyssey through two of the CMS stars at the PHP sky. Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are the latest generation of CMS. Both are also announcing themselves as PHP Application Frameworks and both have a powerful developers community behind them. At a brief look these CMS seem to have good concepts behind them. In this article I talk about Drupal. My Joomla experience has just started and will be the topic of a later article.