PHP Zone - Community for PHP users and developers

Broad NoSQL Adoption in 2012?

egenesky — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:46:47 +0000

The current state of SQL may cause some developers physical pain, especially when they see an industry-wide survey released by Couchbase yesterday that suggest a strong growth in NoSQL adoption in 2012. As a self-defined "Simple, Fast, Elastic NoSQL Database," Couchbase has recently rebranded their NoSQL Membase server from Membase to Couchbase. This merger of Membase, an open source...

Programming Language Popularity by SO and GitHub Cross-Ranking

johncook — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:32:07 +0000

Curator's note: Is this two-faceted method for determining language popularity a good metric. The correlation definitely helps its case but I know that Stack Overflow volume doesn't always indicate popularity, but rather, confusion. Also, RedMonk's charts are showing C# slightly ahead of Java on SO but on the tags page, you can see that C# has almost 60k more tags (almost 25% more) and the...

Practical PHP Refactoring: Convert Procedural Design to Objects

piccoloprincipe — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:30:46 +0000

Even in languages where there are no constructs but classes, there is no constraint that can force a programmer into writing object-oriented code. In many cases, just wrapping a series of functions into classes do not result in the design.The Convert Procedural Design to Objects has great benefits, but it reaches a very large scale (potentially the whole application).What does object-oriented...

Amon: Lightweight, Open Source App and Server Monitoring

mitchp — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:34 +0000

Amon (named after the Egyptian Sun god or a demon) is a self-hosted toolkit that allows you to monitor web apps with a small footprint (Amon can fit in 20MB of RAM) and all the information kept in one place. It's a nice open source tool (with good docs) that can run on the smallest VPS you have. If you don't trust similar cloud solutions (some of which are not free) and you want to be in full...

Algorithm of the Week: Data Compression with Prefix Encoding

stoimen — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:57:43 +0000

Prefix encoding, sometimes called front encoding, is yet another algorithm that tries to remove duplicated data in order to reduce its size. Its principles are simple, however this algorithm tends to be difficult to implement. To understand why, first let’s take a look at its nature. Have a look on the following dictionary.useusedusefulusefulnessuselssuselesslyuselessness ...

Poll: Which HTML5 Refcard Would You Like To See Next?

johnesposito — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:12:56 +0000

So it looks like our new HTML5 Canvas Refcard proved interesting to you, our excellent DZone readers. Our general HTML5 Refcard has received a lot of downloads too -- so we've decided to go all-out and publish a whole series of Refcardz on emerging web technologies. The massive tangle of new features, APIs, etc. that generally goes by 'HTML5' (whether...

Practical PHP Refactoring: Tease Apart Inheritance

piccoloprincipe — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:33:14 +0000

We are entering into the final part of this series, on large scale refactorings: this kind of operations is less predictable and less immediate. However, it is important to be able to perform them with small steps whenever necessary, if we don't want to get stuck in a situation with dozens of broken classes and no clear further step to take. Preview Text: ...

Practical PHP Refactoring: Replace Delegation with Inheritance

piccoloprincipe — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:37:32 +0000

Delegation is a more flexible solution with respect to inheritance, because it allows to change collaborators by introducing new classes. However, it hides the public protocol of the collaborator into a private field.If you find yourself writing many delegation methods, you may refactor to inheritance to simplify the code. The subclass will inherit everything automatically, which makes...

A Twitter Experiment: @devops_jerk

anichols — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:50:43 +0000

I am @devops_jerk. I’m not a jerk – but I have played one on Twitter. On the 15th of October I setup the account on Twitter. Today, not quite 2 months later, I am officially ending the experiment. I learned some interesting things and had a lot of fun in the process – this blog post talks about the experience. Article Type: ...

Algorithm of the Week: Data Compression with Relative Encoding

stoimen — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:01:00 +0000

OverviewRelative encoding is another data compression algorithm. Preview Text: I will show you how you can save space for certain implementations by reducing the amount of characters you are encoding using relative encoding. Christopher Smith

Practical PHP Refactoring: Replace Inheritance with Delegation

piccoloprincipe — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:38:55 +0000

When a subclass violates the Liskov Substitution Principle, or uses only part of a superclass, it is a warning sign that composition can simplify the design.Refactoring to composition transform the superclass into an object of its own, which becomes the collaborator of the class under refactoring. Instead of inheriting every public method, the object will just expose the strictly needed...

Improving Performance by Batching Azure Table Storage Inserts

Brian Swan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:49:37 +0000

This is a short post to share the results of a little investigation I did that was inspired by comments on a post I wrote about using SQL Azure for handling session data. The comment was by someone reporting that SQL Azure seemed to be faster than Azure Table Storage for handling session data.

Developer Machine Automation: Dependencies

markhneedham — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:09:21 +0000

As I mentioned in a post last week we’ve been automating the setup of our developer machines with puppet over the last week and one thing that we’ve learnt is that you need to be careful about how you define dependencies. The aim is to get your scripts to the point where the outcome is reasonably deterministic so that we can have confidence they’re going to work the next we run...

Practical PHP Refactoring: Form Template Method

piccoloprincipe — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:12:16 +0000

Duplication is not always expressed as an identical block of code: often it is subtler to discover, because it exists at an higher level of abstraction.Consider a sorting algorithm, a classic example in computer science: it can be implemented on widely different data structures, as long as their element can be compared and swapped. If we compare quicksort implemented on an array of integers or on...

Algorithm of the Week: Data Compression with Diagram Encoding and Pattern Substitution

stoimen — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:36:33 +0000

Two variants of run-length encoding are the diagram encoding and the pattern substitution algorithms. The diagram encoding is actually a very simple algorithm.