Wednesday, July 7. 2010
In order to manage the success and popularity of a web site, it needs to be designed to cope with a growing number of users. A site designed to support 50 concurrent users can't serve thousands of simultaneous visitors without collapsing. Thus, the very success of a web site could also be the cause of its failure, if it is not able to sustain the sudden and exponential growth in number of users or requests.
A recent study by Computing & Double Take revealed that 83% of UK organisations admit downtime of several hours or more. Even if you manage to avoid a complete collapse, users will not stick around on a slow-loading site. The ability to grow (and shrink!) depending on need or availability thus becomes critical, directly affecting your revenue stream. A system that's able to cope with this changing demand is called scalable.
Tuesday, February 16. 2010
On March 2nd, we are organizing another PHP management seminar in The Netherlands. In one afternoon, we'll update IT managers, CIOs, CEOs, CTOs and (web) development managers on some of the latest developments in PHP development. Topics this year are:
- Service APIs; More and more applications are written using webservices, and in this session we'll show you why.
- Performance: As the internet presence of companies grows, performance is an area many people continue to struggle with.
- Cloud computing: In a few years time, we will all be working with clouds. Now is the time to prepare and learn what this means for your application development efforts.
- Make or Buy'; this eternal question deals with choosing between using off the shelf applications or building your own.
Monday, December 21. 2009
This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.
Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'.
Continue reading "Disruptive events and information flow"
Thursday, April 23. 2009
About 2 months ago, Erik Snoeijs posted a story about the NU.nl backend, a project we did for the largest news site in The Netherlands.
Back then, we already planned to write a follow up post about the front-end technology. Where the back-end focuses on flexibility and ease of use for the Nu.nl editors, the front-end focuses completely on very high performance and getting the news out to the site's readers as quickly as possible.
Thursday, February 12. 2009
 It's long overdue seeing as the new site has been up for about two months now, but better late then never!
Somewhere in March of last year, we heard we might be doing the site NU.nl for ilse media. Readers not local to the Netherlands might not know it, but nu.nl is almost a concept in the Netherlands. It's the news site here, millions of people rely on it for their news throughout the day. So not very surprising we were all very excited about doing this.
Continue reading "NU.nl; the back-end"
Tuesday, August 12. 2008
Recently a colleague stated that in theory, caching could be considered 'evil'.
Now 'evil' is a very broad term which is used a lot in the IT community, but what does it really mean when we're talking about technical solutions?
I asked around, but couldn't find a clear cut definition, so I went searching...
Continue reading "The definition of evil"
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
Saturday the 12th of April a delegation of 8 Ibuildings employees attended the 3rd PFCongrez event in Maarssen, NL. This yearly event is initiated by an association surrounding the popular Dutch website PHPFreakz.nl. As always, conferences like these provide an excellent opportunity to put some faces with the names you got to know over resource websites or IRC.
A comfortable train trip brought us to Utrecht, from where we got on the bus to the location where the conference was held. Some introducing and handshaking later we sat down on some not-too-comfortable chairs, anxiously awaiting the line-up for the day.
Monday, March 17. 2008
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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