Ibuildings Portal

2011: A Year in PHP

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:45:00 +0100

2011 has flown by in a blur as we have been busy helping many new clients with large scale PHP projects - proof that PHP continues to gain traction with enterprise. The speed and cost of developing PHP solutions has always been interesting to IT managers and now that some of the larger PHP projects and frameworks are reaching true maturity through a second and third major iteration, they can also now demonstrate existing enterprise clients in many sectors. The once common conversation about PHP's suitability with large enterprise seems to have been long since forgotten.

The ongoing financial climate only adds pressure for IT managers to cut costs and deliver more value from their existing infrastructure and therefore require enterprises to re-consider any prior aversion to open source and PHP. This is allowing our industry to consistently buck the trend of the markets and expand to support the increased demand.

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Enlighten your lunch

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:57:00 +0200

enlighten (verb)
1. Give (someone) greater knowledge and understanding about a subject or situation.
2. Give (someone) spiritual knowledge or insight.
3. Illuminate or make clearer.

We've recently launched a new initiative at Ibuildings: Enlightening Lunches. The idea, in a nutshell, is to get people together during their lunch break, and offer an arena for employees to share their passions, interests, expertise and insight on a topic of their choice. We want to keep the sessions open, and there are few rules - it's all about learning something new and having fun at the same time. We run these sessions in both the UK and the Netherlands; this post tells about our experiences in the UK.
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Dutch PHP Conference 2011

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:04:00 +0200

I have just returned from the fifth (and my second) Dutch PHP Conference (DPC). For the technical staff at Ibuildings the conference is a highlight of our year. Not only do we have a chance to visit the delightful city of Amsterdam, but we also have 3 days of stimulating tutorials and conference talks. There is the added bonus of being able to meet and exchange ideas with fellow developers from all over Europe and further afield, many of whom are the movers and shakers in the PHP world.

We believe it is of such value that all our developers get the chance to go, and few miss it. It is so easy to carry on creating software in the way we have always done, but we can't afford to do that in the rapidly changing world of the internet; we must keep up to date with changing trends and practices and adapt accordingly. Attending conferences such as DPC plays a vital part in this and we would really encourage others to attend, whatever your role in the development process.

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PHP in 2010 - a year in retrospective

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:48:00 +0100

Every year, for the past three years, Ibuildings has written a retrospective of the past twelve months in PHP. Looking back at last year's post, it amazes me how quickly what we were talking about is now passe. Was it only 2009 that Twitter became mainstream? Though not a heavy contributor to the 140-character medium, I find it one of the best ways to keep track of what's going on in the community. Did we only really have the last twelve months to enjoy Google Chrome? It seems to have been my choice of browser for far longer.

Changes in PHP

Looking at some of the other points raised last year, it seems the predictions were right on the money about PHP 5.3. Certainly within Ibuildings, the drive towards namespacing has been eagerly pursued, with only existing code bases holding back implementation. Hopefully 2011 will see Zend Framework 2 launched, providing a backbone for more applications based around the features in 5.3.

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FOWA 2010: Building Scalable Architectures

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:17:00 +0100

A few weeks ago I visited the Future of Web Apps event in London. One of the most interesting sessions I attended was a talk on scalable architectures by Sandy Jen, the brains behind a popular service called Meebo (an instant messaging program) that was launched 5 years ago. In this blog post I wanted to recap on some of the key points in the session.

Sandy mentioned a few challenges that we need to cope with when building a website or web application. First of all, we need to make sure that the site is going to have the same user experience (UX) across all browsers and devices. Second, we need to take into consideration that the user might not have a stable Internet connection. Users also don't favour the idea of refreshing the page so utilising Ajax could provide a good investment from a UX point of view. Forcing users to download an external application to make our site enjoyable is also a thing of the past; therefore it is a good idea to avoid that approach. Finally we are still boxed in a browser: despite the browser's limitations, we still need to match our users' expectations.
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Search Solutions 2010

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:25:00 +0200

I recently attended Search Solutions 2010, put on by the IR group of the BCS. There have been some excellent roundups of the day already, so I'll just recap with a bit more on some of the talks that stood out for me. The day was split into four sessions, each with three talks following a certain theme. The initial session was on web search, with speakers from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

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Scalable Systems, Part 3: Technology

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:27:00 +0200

This blog series discusses scalability from three distinct perspectives: people, processes and technology. If you haven't read the first and the second part of this series yet, we recommend you read them first before continuing with this post.

While scalability is an art more than a science, over time several sound architectural principles have emerged. Examples include designing for rollback or to be disabled, redundancy of all the components, embedded monitoring, asynchronous communication, stateless systems, etc. There isn't a perfect recipe that works for every project, but always keeping these concepts in mind and finding the right balance dramatically increases the chances of success.
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Supporting a PHP migration

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:21:00 +0200

Recently PHP.net announced, with their latest PHP 5.2.14 release, the end of active development of the PHP 5.2 branch. End of active development means that there will be no more new features or bug-fixes released in the current 5.2 version, and users are encouraged to move to the latest 5.3 branch of PHP. However, security updates will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

According to a recent Twitter poll, we found that over 50% of developers are already working with the latest 5.3 release. An additional 35% is already in the process of migrating to 5.3. This means that the majority of developers see the importance of upgrading and are already taking action, well before PHP's announcement. (We are aware, though, that we are surrounded by a particularly well-educated group of hard-core community people, so these results might be slightly skewed.)

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Scalable Systems, Part 2: Processes

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:42:00 +0200

This blog series discusses scalability from three distinct perspectives: people, processes and technology. If you haven't read the first part yet, we recommend you read it first before continuing with this post.

Processes are critical to scale. They cover and assist all the different stages of software development, from the early phases (planning, design), to implementation, to putting the software into production and maintaining it. Any activity is ultimately risky, and being able to understand the potential risks and gains is essential when growing your business.

When the user load is growing and adding more resources to the existing system is no longer enough, the first step usually consists of redesigning the system. As in every journey, it's good to know both the start and the destination first. So before starting any architecture or software redesign, you need to understand what the current state is. Calculating the headroom of your current system is a process that involves determining the current usage and the free capacity of each component, and measuring it against the expected growth. This will give you a better idea of the time remaining before service degradation or outages, as well as help identify the real bottlenecks of the current architecture.

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New white paper: Horizontally scalable web applications

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:19:00 +0200

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. Applications need to scale upwards to remain responsive during times of heavy load, and backwards to reduce TCO when costly resources are no longer needed. Our aim is to provide a timely and seamless user experience without needing to invest in a permanent platform ready for the biggest potential future traffic spike.

In this white paper, we will discuss horizontal scaling, or adding additional resources (typically servers) to an existing infrastructure and spreading the load of one or more of the subsystems out across them. Because of its "shared nothing" design philosophy, PHP excels at horizontal scaling. We'll only briefly cover vertical scaling (additional RAM, CPUs or hard disk space), as every system can benefit from having bigger servers to run on.

There are two main challenges to scaling applications horizontally:

1) Designing an application that can be scaled as and when the need arises. To do this requires some architectural planning of the system, using techniques such as:

Breaking applications into a series of loosely-coupled subsystems tied together via APIs

Horizontally scaling subsystems individually (as opposed to vertically scaling the entire application)

Scaling the database by using techniques like replication, sharding or federation

2) Arriving at a system which can add and remove resources automatically.

Download this white paper to learn several strategies for horizontal scaling of PHP applications, as well as to understand the overhead required for each one. We'll also make some recommendations about the kinds of scenarios which render each strategy a useful platform choice.

Download now (free, but we ask you to leave your contact details)