MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines could be a major player in the industries of information technology and IT-enabled services, the World Bank said.

Currently, the country corners one percent of the global distribution of offshore IT services and 15 percent of ITES markets.

Although India is the global leader in both IT and ITES, countries such as “China, Mexico, and the Philippines are also emerging as potential players in this space,” the World Bank said in a report entitled Information and Communications for Development 2009.

The Washington-based lender cited Philippine efforts to align skills with global standards, especially since local universities offer finance and accounting courses modeled after the US’ Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

This paves the way for the Philippines to be a “natural choice” for American bank and financial institutions seeking to offshore portions of their operations.

Moreover, nearly one-third of all new jobs created in the country by 2010 could come from the IT sector, the World Bank said, citing a report from the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP).

“In the Philippines, IT services and ITES employed 345,000 people as of mid-2008 and are projected to directly employ close to 1 million people by the end of 2010,” the World Bank said. “Employment of this scale means that the sector would account for 27 percent of all new jobs created in the Philippines by 2010.”

Women account for about 65 percent of the total professional and technical workers in IT services and ITES in the Philippines.

The explosion of the number of internet users in developing countries increased tenfold from 2000 to 2007, and the more than four billion mobile phone subscribers in developing countries offer tremendous opportunities.

It noted the importance of Information and Communication Technology in raising incomes of citizens of developing countries.

For every 10 percentage-point increase in high speed internet connections, there is an increase in economic growth of 1.3 percentage points, the report said.

It also identified the mobile platform as the single most powerful way to reach and deliver public and private services to hundreds of millions of people in remote and rural areas across the developing world.

“Governments can work with the private sector to accelerate rollout of broadband networks, and to extend access to low-income consumers,” the bank added.

I saw a link on twitter referring to PHP optimization advice from Google. There are a bunch of advices there, some of them are quite sound, if not new – like use latest versions if possible, profile your code, cache whatever can be cached, etc. Some are of doubtful value – like the output buffering one, which could be useful in some situations but do nothing or be worse in others, and if you’re a beginner generally it’s better for you to leave it alone until you’ve solved the real performance problems.

However some of the advices make no sense at best and are potentially harmful at worst. Let’s get to it:

First one: Don’t copy variables for no reason. I don’t know what the author intended to describe there, but PHP engine is refcounting copy-on-write, and there’s absolutely no copying going on when assigning variables as they described it:

I don’t know where it comes from but it’s just not so, unless maybe in some prehistoric version of PHP. Which means unless you’re going back to 1997 in a time machine this advice is no good for you.

Next one: Avoid doing SQL queries within a loop. This actually might make sense in some situations, however the code examples they give there is missing one important detail that makes it potentially harmful for beginners (see if you can spot it):

Please repeat after me – DO NOT INSERT USER DATA INTO SQL WITHOUT SANITIZING IT!
Of course, I can not know that $user was not sanitized. Maybe the intent was that it was. But if you give such example and target beginners, you should say so explicitly, every time! People tend to copy/paste examples, and then you get SQL injection in a government site.

Another thing: most of real-life PHP applications usually do not insert data in bulk, except for some very special scenarios (bulk data imports, etc.) – so actually in most cases one would be better off using PDO and prepared statements. Or some higher-level frameworks which will do it for you. But if you roll your own SQL – sanitize the data! This is much more important than any performance tricks.

Next one: Use single-quotes for long strings. PHP code is parsed and compiled, and any possible difference in speed between parsing “” and ” is really negligible unless you operate with hundreds of megabyte-size strings embedded in your code. If you do so, your quotes probably aren’t where you should start optimizing. And of course, using caching (see below) eliminates this difference altogether.

Next one: Use switch/case instead of if/else. This makes no sense since switch does essentially the same things as if’s do. See for yourself, here is the “if” code:

Here is the “switch” code:

You can see there’s a little difference – the latter has CASE/BRK opcodes, which act more or less like IS_EQUAL and JMP, but their plumbing is a bit different, but in general, code is the same (you could even argue “switch” code is a bit less optimal, but that is really the area you shouldn’t be concerned with before you can read and understand the code in zend_vm_def.h – which is not exactly a beginner stuff.

Another thing that the author absolutely failed to mention and which should be one of the very first things anybody who cares about performance should do – is to use a bytecode cache. There are plenty of free ones (shameless plug: Zend Server CE includes one of them – all the performance improvements for $0 and you don’t have to change a bit of code to run it.

Now, I understand Google is not a PHP shop like Yahoo or Facebook or many others. But this article is signed “Eric Higgins, Google Webmaster” and one would expect something much more sound from such source. And in fact there are a lot of blogs and conference talks on the topic and lots of community folks around that I am sure would be ready to help with such article – I wonder why wasn’t it done? Why apparently the best advice we can find from Google is either trivial or useless or wrong?

I think they can do much better, and they should if they take “making the web faster” seriously.

P.S. After having all this written, I also found a comment from Gwynne Raskind, which I advise to read too.

The latest step in Rupert Murdoch’s effort to turn around the fortunes of his digital businesses came Tuesday in the form of hefty layoffs at MySpace.

MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Mr. Murdoch, said it was laying off roughly 400 employees, or nearly 30 percent of its staff. After the layoffs, MySpace will have about 1,000 workers.

The company said the layoffs were an attempt to return to a “start-up culture.”

In a statement, Owen Van Natta, a former Facebook executive who became chief executive of MySpace in April, said: “Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company. I understand these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”

MySpace, which was acquired by News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million, was once the pre-eminent social networking site. But more recently it has lost some luster to Facebook, and at the same time has come up short of News Corporation’s financial projections.

Until recently, MySpace still had an advantage over Facebook in the United States, although Facebook had more users globally. But recently, according to comScore, Facebook has matched MySpace in the United States, with about 70 million members.

MySpace’s identity is closely associated with entertainment and music — a place where, for example, an upstart band would go to find a following. But Facebook has become the gathering place for users who want to share photos and connect with long-lost friends.

“Right now, MySpace has been attempting to compete to be the biggest social networking site,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. “I don’t think that’s been successful. If MySpace is about your entertainment life, Facebook is about your whole life.”

Financially, MySpace is said to be profitable but has fallen short of expectations at a time when some of News Corporation’s other business, like newspapers and local television, have been a drain on the company’s earnings.

Last year, Fox Interactive Media, the unit that includes MySpace, fell about 10 percent short of a $1 billion revenue projection. In the latest quarter the company did not break out revenue for the unit, but did say that revenue at an operating division, of which Fox Interactive Media is a large component, decreased by $254 million, or 35 percent.

In the previous quarter, the unit had declines in both revenue and operating income.

In addition, News Corporation also cut jobs at the unit. “We are examining the operating structure of Fox Interactive Media and its role as a corporate umbrella for a number of our digital businesses,” said Dan Berger, a spokesman for the unit. “In conjunction with the MySpace staff cuts this week, we reduced our corporate F.I.M. staff and also assigned certain positions to specific business units,” he added, referring to Fox Interactive Media.

To revamp MySpace, Mr. Murdoch has lately engineered a series of management changes.

In April, News Corporation appointed Jon Miller, the former chief executive of America Online, as the chief digital officer of the company, overseeing MySpace and the company’s other Internet businesses — Photobucket, IGN Entertainment and the company’s interest in Hulu, the online video partnership with NBC Universal.

Mr. Miller wasted little time in making changes.

Just weeks later he pushed out Chris DeWolfe, one of the founders and then the chief executive of MySpace. Tom Anderson, another founder of the social networking site, has stayed on.

Featuring many new features and improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. This release is named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.  The first thing you’ll notice is that visually 2.8 feels a lot like 2.7, just with some minor tweaks here and there. However once you’ll dig in you’ll begin to appreciate the changes.

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

And Even More

You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!

The Future

We’re already thinking hard about the next versions, 2.9 and 3.0. Keep an eye out for improved media handling, better dependency checking, versioning of templates and themes, and of course the fabled merging of WordPress and MU announced at WordCamp San Francisco two weeks ago.

SearchMe, founded by Randy Adams and John Holland, is a visual search engine that launched into private beta in March 2008.

SearchMe Screenshot

Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement. We think it will help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four- year-old son search for children’s web sites that he’d seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it’d be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for. After more than three years of engineering, imaging billions of web pages, and fine-tuning our approach many times over, Searchme was born. We’ve built it from the ground up to optimize it for speed, but we still have a long way to go. We’re just getting started on our first steps toward creating a smart new way to search today’s Web.

Videos

1. Introduction to Searchme
2. SearchMe Demo

Why spend valuable time coding everything by hand? Using a framework is a great way to save time and effort on your next project—you’ll have a firm foundation to build upon, there will be pre-built modules to perform tedious coding tasks, and if you’re a learner, it’s a great way to learn about good coding practice. PHP’s massive popularity means that developers have a wide variety of frameworks to choose from. We’re sure you can find one amongst these 16 to meet your needs.

Agavi: This PHP 5-based framework started off as a fork of the popular Mojavi project. While it can be used as a web site construction kit, its primary focus is on building fully-fledged applications.

Akelos: Akelos is a PHP port of a Ruby on Rails framework for building web applications. It avoids complex configurations, making it ideal for use on simpler web servers. There’s a healthy community around this one!

CakePHP: The very well-known CakePHP is easy for coders of all skill levels to use. It’s based on the same principles that guide Ruby on Rails, and its heavy focus on rapid deployment methods make it a great choice for developers who are squeezed for time (see SitePoint’s beginner’s CakePHP tutorial to get started).

CodeIgniter: EllisLab’s CodeIgniter has won wide praise for its small footprint and speed, and has become a favorite amongst many developers. There’s extensive documentation and a large community of users to help you out.

eZ Components: OK, so we’re stretching the definition of framework here. eZ Components, as the name suggests, is a library of individual components for common tasks. If you’re familiar with the ezPublish CMS, you might have seen some of these components before!

Fuse: Fuse is based on Ruby on Rails and CakePHP, but has had many features added by the development team to make the most stable platform they could. There are frequent updates—development on version 2.0 is underway!

Horde: This mainstay of the PHP framework world grew from the Horde webmail and groupware suite. If you’re a developer who speaks a language other than English, you may be interested in the fact that the framework is designed specifically to be localization-friendly.

Kohana: Kohana, originally based on CodeIgniter, puts its focus on being small, fast, and secure.

PHP on TRAX: A PHP framework based on Ruby on Rails (Get that name? Nudge nudge!) that is focused on building database-backed web applications based on the MVC structure. You’ll find a healthy developer community, demos, and even screencasts.

PHPOpenBiz: This PHP framework claims to have business development in mind, though we’re not sure how it is that other frameworks aren’t suitable for that purpose.

Qcubed: Qcubed is a fork of the Qcodo framework which had remained dormant for some time. It’s back, and its focus is on rapid prototyping. You’ll find fun tutorials on the site, and an enthusiastic new set of developers.

Seagull: This well-established PHP framework is easy to pick up for developers of any skill level. If you’re a beginner, you’ll find many pre-built apps to examine and extend, and there’s something for experts too—cash bounties are offered for improvements to the code.

Symfony: The ever-popular Symfony is directed more at enterprise application development, and it may have some trouble with shared hosting solutions as they lack a PHP accelerator. This is definitely more of an advanced developer framework than some of the others out there.

WACT: Short for Web Application Component Toolkit, WACT emphasizes the need for frequent code refactoring, unit testing, and good security.

Zend: Zend is focused on Web 2.0 style applications. It’s simple to use APIs from sites such as Google, Flickr, Amazon and so on (check out the SitePoint Zend tutorial for more on this). With a massive user base, you’re sure to find plenty of support and advice around the Web.

ZooP: A mature PHP framework for beginners and advanced users alike, ZooP focuses on being lightweight and easy to learn. Features include easy use of PEAR modules, the prototype Ajax framework and stacks of documentation.

Of course there are many more frameworks out there—users of our PHP Application Design Forum drop by every day with discussions of what they’re working on. What’s your favorite PHP framework and why?