So I was sitting here thinking to myself “This is Friday and I’m not getting much of anything done. Maybe I should write another Friday Framework Highlight.” I figured that it was a good idea so I pondered what I should write. I came up blank and so I asked Matthew Weier O’Phinney. “Multiple writers for Zend_Log,” he said. I agreed.
One of the things that I think PHP developers do not do well is asynchronous processing. PHP developers have written reams of applications that do all their calculations up front and over-and-over again for multiple requests. Or they will just write their code to work linearly, regardless of the scalability implications. In this chapter I wrote a simple example showing how you can do some asynchronous processing. It is a basic example that I use and there is a LOT more I could have talked about, and perhaps I should have. But this example will get you started thinking about how to architect your application so that you can greatly increase the scalability of your application.
I was getting ready to post the Powerpoint presentations from my last two user group meetings when I fat-fingered my “My Documents” folder and accidentally opened up a Word doc that had an old article that I had written for a Zend newsletter a while ago. So for this case of serendipity I decided that I would repost this article, which I had written long before I had a blog. The basic premise is that once you get past a few minor differences, an organization can move from Java development to PHP development in a very short amount of time, saving time, money and headaches.
Let’s take a quick look at something that’s kind of neat in Zend Framework. I’ve been doing some work with Adobe on some articles and one of them was on working with mobile clients with Flash. Well, me being the masochist I did more. What I did was write an example that worked as a full website, an Ajax website, a Flash service and an XML-RPC service.
Setting the Stage
First I started with a Zend_Db row instance and it’s corresponding table instance.
So, you just received instructions to download and try out Zend Server. Or, you heard that Zend Server is a “PHP Application Server”, but you have no idea what that means and you want to find out. What do you do?
What I have often seen is that people will download and install Zend Server, try a PHP application on it and see if it works. They see that it does work. Then they ask “ok, it works but it’s not worth the price so I’ll just go back to what I was using before.” The problem here is that more often than not, and I’m sure it’s a MUCH more often than not, “worth” is not defined.
Quick! Raise your hand if you know the most underutilized feature in PHP? If you’re thinking type-juggling you’re wrong (that’s probably the most over-utilized feature). It is, in my mind, SPL. If you are doing any data processing whatsoever you are using arrays. And most likely you are doing database queries, iterating over the results and doing your algorithm-ing. But what if you have additional functionality that you need to have integrated with your data. You could go the traditional route and copy and paste half your application around or you could build, what we like to call structured applications. SPL allows you to do that. How? Well, that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?”. Here’s your excerpt…
Communication is key to building applications now and for the future. While it is not something that I think that everyone should do, I have not seem many applications that make good use of streams in PHP. Streams can be immensely useful in the right situations, but a lot of developers are not really aware of how streams can be used. In this excerpt from chapter 4 of my book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” I talk about how you can use streams for fun, and maybe for profit. While I don’t think you will end up basing your application around streams it is a really good idea to know how streams work. With that in mind, here is an excerpt from the book.
So, today kind of got away from me and I was trying to think of what I could do to salvage this day when I came across an idea that I have had in the past. As you all probably know, Zend has salespeople. Those sales people have sales engineers who show how to use our products. However, I personally hate being on the phone for a canned presentation when all I really want to do is tinker. So, in an effort to produce something of benefit today I decided to start a series of blog posts on how to evaluate Zend Server if you are a tinkerer, like me.
The chapter on Character Encoding was probably my favorite chapter to write. I hadn’t even submitted it as a chapter in my initial book proposal. Then I was at a customer site who was having some issues with UTF-8 and they asked me if I knew UTF-8. I said yes, and I was right. However, as I examined their problem I found that I knew less than I thought I did. Then I realized that while this 3.5-year PHP consultant knew Unicode, UTF-8, character encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-7, I didn’t understand them as well as I thought I had. With that I threw this chapter in the book. Knowing about character encoding is what many developers have. Not as many truly understand it. In this chapter I try to de-mystify character encoding as a whole. In other words, it’s not something that messes up how your web pages look, but rather, it is a tool for you to use to make your site available. With this chapter you will learn the history of character encodings and why they’re so messed up. Additionally, you will learn how UTF-8 actually works and how it’s related to Unicode (it’s not the same thing).
PHP developers know text really, really well. We can write SQL, we can build HTML, we can work with XML. But computers don’t speak in terms of structured text markup, they speak in terms of bytes. And while there are many PHP developers who can speak at the lower level of bytes and bits and stuch, there are many more that have difficulty there. This chapter is here to help the developers who are not as familiar with communicating directly over the wire. This is a short excerpt from a very long chapter on Binary Protocols.