Found out about the debugging and profiling tool Xdebug, today.  It looks like a nice tool for checking out how a web application is performing.  Additionally, there is a pretty nice front-end for Xdebug called “webgrind” that I’m starting to use.  Pretty nice combination so far.

I’ve also been working with the Zend Framework these days, and I’m realizing that the Zend Framework might be the only PHP framework (or one out of a precious few,) worth using at this point in time.  As a framework, it does have more overhead than plain PHP scripts… but so does any framework; at least to some extent.  So, while I still have the “opportunity” to work with PHP for the time being, I figure I might as well go with something like the Zend Framework.

Even with some initial (very informal and uneven,) memory footprint-based testing between a past CakePHP-based project and my new Zend Framework-based project, the memory footprint appears to be much smaller on the Zend Framework side of things.  CakePHP is still my “go to” framework when using PHP… but, if things continue going well with the Zend Framework work… things may change.