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Content Tagged with database + PHP

A standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages.

Using PHP 5's DOM functions to create XML files from SQL data

The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server.

Propel is an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework for PHP5.

If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.

What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be supported in future versions of the software.

Two examples that touch my daily life are Firefox, and Wordpress.

Lately (since around March) I’ve been having lots of trouble with Firefox. I thought upgrading to Firefox 3 would’ve helped, but it really didn’t. Running it on OS X, Firefox hangs frequently enough that I’m actually considering using Safari (I do NOT like Safari). Know what happened right around that time? Ah - I found the firefox plugins for managing EC2 and S3. So today I’ll uninstall those and see if it helps.

With Wordpress, there are two things I’m missing: I need to let readers subscribe to comments via email, and I need better Google AdSense for Search integration with WordPress. Both things are kinda maybe supported in one version or another “but should work under…” - whatever. I don’t really want to spend my time downloading, reading the documentation to do the install, doing the install and configuration, etc., and then finding out that it doesn’t work, or worse, having it look on the surface like it works, but then finding later that it fails in evil-but-silent ways.

These two products are by no means exceptions. Moodle, PHP-Nuke, XOOPS, MediaWiki, Twiki, Postnuke… and for that matter, OpenLDAP, BIND, SSH, MySQL, Sendmail, PAM… all have plugins available written by other folks, and all have bitten me at one point or another. Usually when it comes time to upgrade the base software.

I’m not saying anything new here. People have had this problem with lots of different software products for a long time. My question is “why is this still a problem?” I’m not asking this because I have some magical obvious solution or answer, I’m asking because I feel like there’s probably more to it than I’m grasping. I’m not a masterful developer, or even a masterful software project manager, so I’m calling on all of you who are (or are closer than I am) to help me understand the problem. Some day, I might find myself in a position to take the wrong or right path where plug-ins are concerned, and I’d like to be more informed than I am so I can avoid putting users in the position I find myself in when I use other peoples’ software. Has Joel blogged this yet? If so, I can’t find it. Links please?

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Developing and using shell scripts to deploy applications can lead to a maintenance nightmare, so I’ve decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. The reason I’ve chosen Phing is that it’s simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

I was writing a utility in Python (using boto) to test/play with Amazon’s SQS service. As boto isn’t particularly well documented where SQS specifically is concerned, I also plan to post some examples (either here or on Linuxlaboratory.org, or both). When I had some trouble getting a message that was sent to a queue, I went to the Amazon documentation, and found this little gem in the Amazon Web Services FAQ

I am sure that my queue has messages, but a call to ReceiveMessage returned none. What could be the problem?

Due to the distributed nature of the queue, a weighted random set of machines is sampled on a ReceiveMessage call. That means only the messages on the sampled machines are returned. If the number of messages in the queue is small (less than 1000), it is likely you will get fewer messages than you requested. If the number of messages in the queue is extremely small, you might not receive any messages in a particular ReceiveMessage response. Your application should be prepared to poll the queue until a message is received. Note that with the 2008-01-01 version of Amazon SQS, you?re charged for each request you make, so set your polling frequency with that in mind.

So… if you were planning to decouple application components using SQS using an ‘eventual consistency’ model, keep in mind that they’re using the same model, and that they’re charging you for the privilege of eventually getting the messages you’ve already paid to put there, but aren’t necessarily available at any given point in time. I personally think this is a little goofy, and wrong.

If I put a message in a queue, I should be charged for actually getting the message. I should *not* be charged for checking to see if Amazon’s internal workings have made my messages available to me yet.

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