As web development has advanced and websites have gotten more complex and dynamic, the scalability of your web application has become a key concern. Proper use of caching strategies, such as finding the biggest smallest reusable item, storing in closest to final form, and write-through caching can greatly increase the scalability of your website. In this article, discover how to apply these caching techniques to maximum effect! –by Eli White

The Great Baltimore Check-In was a great project I’ve recently had the pleasure of being to be able to work on again, two years in a row. It’s one of those projects that isn’t run of the mill, allows you to think outside of the box, and gives you a chance to interact with some great technologies, mainly Foursquare and Twilio. It feels like you have the possibility to change the way people interact with your city on a scale that is larger than just the people directly connected to you. In the end, you release it into the wild and see what happens. –by Christopher Michael Stone

PHP is a glue language, and the list of available functionality that comes with PHP “out of the box” is astonishing and varied. Despite the issue of poor internals documentation, PHP is a fairly popular language for writing C extensions. PECL extends that list of functionality even further with more extensions that do everything from making additional C libraries available to allowing PHP to be profiled and debugged. However, if you have the need for a particular technology – perhaps interfacing with a C library or extending the language in some manner – that isn’t filled by a core extension or one from PECL – you may be surprised to learn that there are a large number of third-party extensions available in the wild. One of the best places to find these extensions is Github. A simple search for the technology you’re interested in can save you from wasting time and effort. –by Elizabeth M. Smith

PHPCR is an adaptation of the JCR standard which can be used to connect a PHP application with a JCR-compliant repository. Magnolia CMS is a popular open-source, enterprise-grade Java CMS that uses a JCR repository to store web content. This article demonstrates how PHPCR can be used to easily integrate a PHP front-end with the Magnolia CMS content repository without needing special Java knowledge or training. –by Vikram Vaswani

We began looking at improving performance amongst the major frameworks: Zend Framework (1.12), Yii Framework (1.1.12), Kohana (3.2.2) and CakePHP (2.2.2). Now, it’s time to take a look at a database query for each of these and what caching does for them. –by Matthew Setter

Call me crazy, but I’d much rather be curious and suffer the potential consequences than worry about what those consequences could be and refuse to change out of fear. –by Marco Tabini

CodeWorks has been a blast, and now, let’s see what PHP is doing on an enterprise level. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long