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Monday, March 31. 2008

Multithreading in PHP with CURL

Most PHP developers have heard of the CURL extension for PHP or even used it. However it is mostly used in a basic form: to retrieve content from other websites or (RESTful) webservices. Ofcourse PHP itself offers several functions (like fopen or fsockopen) for getting this content, but they are all very basic. It is easy to run into limitations, for example you might want to define the request method or set another user agent (if you're building a webspider). This is where the curl extension kicks in. It is a separate library that has to be compiled with PHP in order to use it. The Curl extension has many functions and options which offer the developer more flexibility than the standard PHP functions.

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Posted by Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems at 14:16 | Comments (35) | Trackbacks (2)
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Thursday, March 27. 2008

Less is more

A couple of general rules for programmers are: do not put too much code in one function and use a name that covers the content of it. If you still have a lot of code, try to split it up in different functions and move specific low level code to separate files. And remember: a good programmer doesn't hesitate to throw away superfluous code.

Too much information
However, the Less is More rule does not only apply to programmers and their code.
Right after posting this blog, a colleague asked:
"Can't you just tell me what your blog is about, so I don't have to read it completely?"
Well.. that's exactly what this blog is about!

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Posted by Jeroen van Sluijs at 16:09 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
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Tuesday, March 18. 2008

DPC 2008, the votes go to: what's new in PHP6

After announcing Derick Rethans as the most requested PHP Guru in the Call for Ideas for the Dutch PHP Conference, we are now announcing the most requested topic: PHP6 (and, if not released by the time of the conference, the upcoming PHP 5.3 release).

The talk will not only cover the new features of PHP6, but also addresses what you can do in your apps right now, to smooth the transition later. In other words, tips 'n tricks to keep your code 'portable' across versions.

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Posted by Joni Overbosch at 18:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, March 17. 2008

How we build scalable web applications

There is lots of information available on how to build scalable web applications. I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of how we at Ibuildings build scalable web applications.

Often we're dealing with large applications that need to scale very well. Sometimes this is due to high load/traffic but, it can also be that the web application is used in many ways. For example an application can have a heavily used CRM like back-end system. The front-end website uses the same system to publish information from it. You can imagine that if you didn't set it up correctly and the load increases on the back-end, it affects the website users and vice versa.


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Posted by Martin Roest at 13:54 | Comments (3) | Trackback (1)
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Saturday, March 15. 2008

ATK's hidden gems, part 2

ATK contains lots of hidden gems. Most of them are hidden because they are undocumented or because they are only documented in the API docs (which nobody seems to read...). In the past few years we've tried to improve the documentation for ATK. We've created a Wiki with lots of how-to's, the "Pizza Guides", a demo application and improved the API documentation. However there are still some features of ATK nobody seems to know about.

In this second iteration of the "ATK's hidden gems" series we will look at a largely unknown feature of ATK's record actions.

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Posted by Peter C. Verhage at 23:35 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
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Wednesday, March 12. 2008

PHP London Conference 2008


I was one of the lucky ones to win a trip to the PHP Conference London 2008 in a company wide raffle (the dutch side, that is), together with Marc Veldman. This was pretty exciting for a number of reasons...


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Posted by Patrick van der Velden at 23:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Implementing Sphinx search

In a recent project we were asked to implement a full text search engine called Sphinx. Sphinx was created back in 2001 because the creators could not find a decent search solution for a database driven website. Due to the really fast searching and indexing, Sphinx is currently used on a wide variety of sites which all have to handle a lot of data (think of sites as blogcatalog.org and thepiratebay.org).


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Posted by Peter Bottenberg at 09:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Friday, March 7. 2008

Other customers and projects

A few years ago we worked for other customers, had fewer projects and a smaller geographic workfield than today. Today we operate in the whole country and also in Belgium, the UK and Scandinavia. We obviously have expanded our work field. Furthermore the assignments we do today have a shorter lead time, are larger and more complex than before.

A few years ago we focused more on the development. We started an assignment without or with only a small description of the required functionality. Today we are really convinced that a project won't succeed without a comprehensively functional and technical design. When we noticed the need of the designs we specialized developers in this initial part of an assignment . We also added the design phases, functional and technical, to our standard process.


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Posted by Anouk Ilic at 10:50 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, March 3. 2008

Unicode support in PHP 6

A few days ago I was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting. One of the talks there, was about PHP 6 and the unicode support it promised by Andrei Zmievski. I have long been waiting for unicode support in PHP because of some projects in the past where I discovered the limitations we currently have to work around. So I was coming into the talk expecting that it could now speak unicode natively.

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Posted by Erik Snoeijs at 09:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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