Today I watched an interview from QCON London with two ThoughtWorks employees who are involved in designing large scalable and cooperative applications. The basis for the communication that they use was simple web protocols over the HTTP 1.1 transport layer.
Some of the things I took away from the interview include:
It is always a pleasure listening [...]
Have you ever been in a place where you’re maintaining two blogs and want to copy posts from one to the other? I wrote a WordPress plugin that does just that. In our case it copies from Dayspring’s internal blog to our public one. This removes the tedium of having to copy content, comments, [...]
So Jason and I stumbled upon an ugly version dependency. It wasn’t terrible but required special testing and fixing and was annoying for a few minutes.
Jason has PHP version 5.2.6 on his machine. He wrote a php page for me that did some date math using strtotime. Specifically he did this:
$earliest_time = [...]
Looking for a quick way to make groovy charts in PHP?
I used pChart (recommended by Jeffrey) for some charts on a page on our Intranet. It has a nice default look and was fairly straightforward to work with for my basic line graphs.
Get it here: http://pchart.sourceforge.net
So I stumbled on this test framework for PHP called SimpleTest.
What is particularly interesting is that it is used by CakePHP and so it can be used for sites we write using Cake (As a side note, I would recommend writing apps using CakePHP. I did some swearing during the development of my first app, [...]
Here’s a link interesting presentation on how Facebook tunes its application performance (PHP):
http://sizzo.org/wp/talks (download any of the Facebook Performance Tuning PDFs)
If your site has enough traffic to need any of these techniques you can use Facebook as a model.
One especially interesting piece is APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which caches the compiled PHP opcode so that [...]
Here’s a pretty handy tool for figuring out why your page is so slow. It beats having to write your own timing code.
There’s also a profiling feature that tracks the number of times a section of code is run. Useful to discover that you’re running a O(n^2) function more times than you thought [...]
Now that we’ve gotten a few PHP projects under our belt, I’ve been looking at PHP frameworks (namely symfony, CakePHP, and CodeIgniter) to provide a solid structure for our code and to save us from rewriting the same functions and “reinventing the wheel” all over again.
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