I gave a talk for the San Jose PHP meetup last night on PHP scalability and optimization. Everything from good code (and bad code) to infrastructure (including Cloud Hosting with Aptana) was covered.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, I’ll respond to them as soon as I can!
Enjoy.
Welcome to Gen X Design. The name’s a little corny, I know, but it’s one of those things I’ve used since I was a kid.
Anyway, I built this site for me (and some friends) to share their thoughts and ideas. I love all things web 2.0, shiny icons, and gradients. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, work for eMeter, and am sometimes available for contract work.
Mozilla announced a new feature for add-ons today: collections. It also looks like they’re getting the ball rolling with several useful collections, such as the Web Developer Collection. It includes all sorts of goodness like Firebug, ySlow, GreaseMonkey, ColorZilla, and many more. Well worth a quick visit.
FireFox Web Developer Collection
David Walsh has put together a really handy plugin for MooTools called ScrollSpy. What impressed me the most was the automatic display of a “Return to Top” link on your page once you’ve scrolled beyond a certain boundary. There are also a handful of other neat demos worth checking out. Sounds simple, but if you think about it, there are tons of great applications for this plugin.
http://davidwalsh.name/scrollspy
It’s been said a thousand times I’m sure, but picking the right JavaScript framework is a pain. There are all sorts of biased arguments for one vs. another, but there’s really nothing subjective out there… until now. Arguably, jQuery is probably the most popular JS framework out in the wild, but that doesn’t always mean it’s the best choice. What you choose should really depend on what you’re trying to do. Aaron Newton of Clientcide has put together a really impressive look at jQuery vs. MooTools, which doesn’t categorically say one is better than the other, but, rather, goes into detail about why one framework is better than the other based on your needs. Definitely worth a read:
www.jqueryvsmootools.com
ORM is certainly a very popular concept these days, but I haven’t really come across any PHP implementations that I found worth-while. Sure, big frameworks like CakePHP may have ORM functionality, but I’m not a fan of huge frameworks. I’ve also dabbled in my own implementations, but never got too far, as I’m not a fan of re-inventing the wheel. At any rate, I stumbled across Doctrine by accident (good ol’ RSS readers), and am impressed, mostly because it’s something that can be integrated into existing projects / frameworks.
www.doctrine-project.org
Ajaxload.info used to be the site of choice when it came to generating preloader images… unfortunately, I think it’s been bested. Preloaders.net allows you to generate not only the standard set of preloaders, but even 3D ones! You also get much more control (size, speed, etc.) and the quality of the final images is impressive. Definitely worth checking out.
www.preloaders.net
Phil
Oct 31 '08 at 6:27 pm
I was delighted to learn that SPL is compiled by default in PHP5 now. I hadn’t checked on that one in a long time…
Instead of include_once and require_once, do you recommend simply using include and require?
Also, with autoload (_autoload or spl method), that stuff is not loaded twice, because those are only called the first time the class file is needed, right?
Great slides. Wish I could have caught your presentation. Congrats, my young friend!
Phil
Oct 31 '08 at 6:37 pm
Oh, and what’s the 2nd false argument to spl_autoload_register. It’s not documented? Namespace?
Phil
Oct 31 '08 at 6:50 pm
I’ve been toying with the idea of using a singleton for my database class… or one for read and another for right… or a singleton with somekind of factory init which passes back the db handle for read or write depending on an arg… Thoughts? I use a singleton for my error messages class, so the model/validate methods can write to it, the controller can check it, and the view can show the errors easily… It’s like globals through a back-door, but right now I’m saying global $DB_WRITE anyway…
Brant
Feb 2 '09 at 10:29 pm
Installing APC isn’t as easy as it sounds….
checking whether the C compiler works… configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs.
If you meant to cross compile, use `–host’.
See `config.log’ for more details.
ERROR: `/root/tmp/pear/APC/configure –with-apxs’ failed
Ian
Feb 2 '09 at 10:54 pm
Common gotcha, what you’re missing there is the apache developer libraries. What distro are you on? For example, on Ubuntu you can install those using “sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev”