2025 Dec 20
In memory of Ryan Weaver: For his son
Ryan Weaver, who was the Symfony Documentation lead and founder of Symfonycasts passed away on August 25, 2025 from glioblastoma.
Blog Posts
2018 Jan 24
Should you be using MariaDB or MySQL?
MariaDB started life as a fork of Oracle MySQL, and offered some important new features and performance improvements. As a project from MySQL's founder ("Monty" Widenius), and initially advertised as a drop-in replacement for MySQL, MariaDB got a lot of traction in a short amount of time, and for largely political reasons, it is now in some linux distributions, what you get when you do a package installation for MySQL.
2017 Jul 16
PHP Mysql support: mysql or mysqlnd?
"So you are installing a modern version of php using one of the alternative repositories, and suddenly you are confronted with a confusing choice. You want support for mysql (mysqli or PDO-mysql) in your php program. But which one to choose?"
2017 Jul 5
The battle for Net Neutrality continues
It seems we have to keep fighting this war to keep the Internet a fair and open system for all.
2012 Oct 15
You probably don't know REST
As Web developers, most of us have either utilized a REST Api to integrate with services like Flickr, Facebook, Amazon or Twitter, or created one to allow others to integrate with our systems. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) on the surface, seems to be simple which perhaps explains why so many REST api's are largely incorrect and not RESTful at all.
2012 Aug 22
New Proem documentation and project blog.
Over the last few weeks I have invested quite a bit of time updating the documentation. I'm not a technical writer, hell, I wouldn't call myself much of a writer at all so Ive struggled with this somewhat, but it is slowly getting there.
2012 Aug 7
Benchmarking Proem Framework
After a few long months of benchmarking and optimising Proem's code base I finally have some graphs of the results.
2012 May 13
phpFreaks on Facebook
We have a facebook page, and will be using it to provide updates on interesting happenings at the phpfreaks community. Show your support for the site by liking us, and telling your friends about the site.
2012 Apr 9
Introducing the Proem Framework
Proem Framework aims to be a lightweight, fast and simple to use MVC implementation written specifically for PHP5.4. Milestone #3 - 0.3.0 has just been released.
2012 Mar 4
Proem Framework 2nd milestone complete.
After almost two months in development milestone 2 is now complete and version 0.2.0 has been released.