Server-Side Magazine

Today was another example of where a correct SQL_MODE saved customer data from being corrupted. By default, MySQL does not enforce data integrity. It allows what is called silent truncations where the result of what you INSERT or UPDATE does not represent truth. NOTE: I see very few customers ever have this correctly [...]

This video details the use of Ruby, EventMachine, RabbitMQ, and various distributed systems techniques in the building of the VMforce large scale cloud system at VMware. Topics covered will be the cloud system architecture, asynchronous programming in Ruby, EventMachine, Sinatra, and the use of messaging in a complex distributed system. [...]

At NodeJitsu we know how important it is to build quality open-source software and when there is a problem with one of our projects, we want to fix it. We also know that often the right solution involves reaching out to the community and helping contribute to other people’s libraries. [...]

I am happy to announce yet another screencast tutorial for all you nerds out there: Build A Content Management System. OK, not the most exciting title, but still an exciting course for those PHP nerds who want to go from PHP basics and get into building a full-fledged PHP application from scratch. [...]

Today (June 1st) I got to give an online talk with Adobe on how to create a stunning analytics dashboard with Flex and PHP (recording here).  I’m a horrible graphic designer and so I don’t know how stunning it was, but from the technical perspective we covered a lot and it was a lot of [...]

Recently I needed to process a huge array of data and because of PHP’s somewhat inefficient variables and especially arrays that was resulting in “out of memory” errors. However, I couldn’t use any other tools than PHP so was forced to come up with a solution implementation in it. Here is how I solved it using principles from functional languages. [...]

Visualizations often are a great tool for understanding code interdependencies, especially when you’re facing the challenge of determining interdependencies among more than 10,000 code modules. That happens to be about the number of modules that comprise the Facebook front-end code. [...]

MongoDB is now live at Craigslist, where it is being used to archive billions of records.

Craiglist has kept every post anyone has ever made in a large MySQL cluster. A few months ago, they began looking for alternatives: schema changes were taking forever (Craigslist’s schema has changed a couple times since 1995) and it wasn’t really relational information. [...]

A severed head is never fun, and in git this is no different. In fact, a detached head can cause quite the headache. In this article I will discuss what a detached head is, how it can happen, and most importantly, what you can do about it. But before I begin, let’s rehash a bit about how git works. [...]

.htaccess, the file which control the Apache webserver, is very useful and allows you to do a lot of things. In this article, I have compiled 10 .htaccess snippets that any web developer should have in his toolbox. [...]

Many PHP programmers simply ignore its most powerful feature – it is fully object oriented. When PHP was first introduced it was a simple scripting language but over time it has developed into a fully fledged language with all the usual modern conveniences. [...]

Create & Deploy a Node.JS App in Less than 2 Min! [...]

There’s an interesting series of blog posts in progress: Why Java folks should stop looking down on C# : Part 1 and Part 2 (at the point of time of writing this post). It offers an interesting and detailed set of contrasts between Java and C#. It is a detailed analysis and makes for very [...]

A multimedia exam suite built on Asp.NET and Youtube [...]

I’ve hacked together a small example on how to easily cache full responses in Lithium. [...]

A friend asked me last night for my favorite “Mongo Gotcha.” He of course had one in mind, but I came up with a few, so I thought I’d jot a down the ones that I came up with on the spot (if you have more good ones, feel free to add in comments, and I’ll update) [...]

There is a big change to the handling of assets in Rails 3.1 compared to previous versions called the asset pipeline and this can have an effect on your production deployments, more so than any previous Rails update I can remember. Here is a list of the gotchas I came across and how to fix them. [...]

In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative. [...]

Data storage does not always need a complete SQL RDBMS like PostgreSQL. In fact, sometimes small is beautiful, and plain text data formats can be even easier to use with the right libraries. [...]

They are real, objective issues which I have personally encountered in my normal day-to-day activiites. Nothing on this site should be taken to be the view of my employer or is related to my employer in any way. [...]

Zend Framework has own Reflection extension. It is mostly build upon genuine PHP Reflection API and extends existing features. The completely new Zend_Reflection module feature is introspection of docBlock tags. Docblock introspection Zend_Reflection provides Zend_Reflection_Docblock class, which give us possibility to get some information from docBlock, including: tags (@tag), return type (@return), parameters (@param) [...]

We continue our look with part 2 of our closed captioned video tutorial series on Form Validation, from the PHP section of the Killersites Video Tutorial Library! We are happy to announce that we are well on our way to closed captioning all of our Web Design and Web Programming related video training courses. [...]

I have been evaluating InnoDB compression and have results to share. My process for testing new features is to start with simple benchmarks and then run more complex tests once I understand the performance and confirm that the results on the simple tests are OK. [...]

Every work day Facebook is safely updated with hundreds of changes including bug fixes, new features, and product improvements. Given hundreds of engineers, thousands of changes every week and hundreds of millions of users we have worldwide, this task seems like it should be impossible. In this tech talk, Chuck Rossi will dig into the tools and processes built by our Release Engineering team that make it possible to push daily updates to the site. [...]

A few weeks ago I asked questions to three people using node.js in their products. This week, I figured I’d ask Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, 4 questions about the history and future of his creation. Without further ado, here is the interview: [...]

Java Object class comes with native clone() method that returns the copy of the existing instance. To use java cloning, all you need is to implement the marker interface java.lang.Cloneable so that it won’t throw CloneNotSupportedException at runtime. [...]

The question of why and how git is so flexible is a really interesting one. Is it a consequence of its having been around for so long? Or that it was forged, as it were, at the hands of people who were doing real, large projects (e.g. Linux)? [...]

I was having a good discussion with a couple of friends about the support of parallel tasks in .NET. If you too are interested in the same, I have written a couple of articles that can give you an overview of the support for parallelism and concurrency in .NET applications. [...]

This is going to be my first post on Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and Ajax controls. Ajax is my favourite technology and I use it a lot when I build ASP.Net applications. This is going to be a beginner’s level post on Ajax in ASP.Net applications. [...]

If you think that you’ve done everything in terms of performance optimization of your Zend Framework-based project, I bet that your application configuration file was not included in that process. [...]

In this in depth “screencast of the week,” I’ll take you through the process of building an authentication system with CodeIgniter. Need to restrict access to certain parts of your website to only those who’ve logged in? This tutorial will teach you how! [...]

If you’ve heard about Node, or read any articles claiming how awesome it is, you may be wondering, “What is Node.js anyway?”. You may even still have questions about what Node is after reading their own home page. Node is definitely not for every programmer, but it could be the right answer for some. [...]

At Engine Yard we have always adhered to a strong belief that open, community-based innovation and standards are the future of computing. We created our platform around Ruby and Rails not just because of their substantial technical merits and open source roots, but also because of the vibrant community surrounding them. Our entire stack is open source, and where standards exist we adopt them. We are laser-focused on providing the best Platform-as-a-Service out there, runnable on multiple infrastructures and supporting the options our customers demand.

[...] I have bad news for you buddy, all code is crap. No matter how much effort you put on it, there is always a majority of programmers who are going to think that your code sucks and that they could have done it 10 times better. [...]

I’m playing with PHP and CouchDB. After writing a class to connect PHP and CouchDB I’ve done a variation of the interface to use CouchDB with PHP in a similar way to ORM. Yes. I know ORM means Object Relational Mapping and CouchDB isn’t a Relational Database but have a look to the following interface: [...]

Specific Query Performance Tips (see also database design tips for tips on indexes): [...]

Cookies and sessions in PHP applications allow you to keep track of your users and their activities. [...]

I’m a big fan of making idiomatic language bindings for APIs. Making common tasks such as URI generation, transport, authentication, and payload parsing configurable options and providing a higher-level API lets application developers focus on the business domain instead of low-level networking. [...]

If you are new to kohanaframework, implementing validation will be an adventure, especially if you are looking for ajax validation. In this article I will present a simple way to implement somel necessary validations using ajax in a sign up form. Lets start from the view. [...]

Here’s a counterpoint to the currently popular view of “fat controllers are bad”, and the current fad of everyone and their cousin implementing service layers: [...]

The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. [...]

Git is categorized as DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), because is not dependant on a central server. So the academic way for working with Git is pushing/pulling data from/to each developer repository. [...]

While I was at nodeconf, I caught some of Henrik Joreteg‘s b-track talk which was an introduction to Single Page Apps. Node.js is a great platform for Single Page Apps because of it’s real-time capabilities. This is a subject that has been obscured and confused by buzzwords and FUD. Henrik had a limited time to talk, so let’s revisit this subject. [...]

Useful if you’re developing with node.js

It’s true that to solve a problem in TSQL you have many choices, and adopting any of these techniques you can get your desired results. Today we will discuss two very commonly used IN and EXISTS clause to filter query result set based on records from a sub-query. As compared to EXISTS, IN is more commonly used, but which one is more efficient? That’s what we are looking for, today. [...]

I have worked on a lot of different systems and projects in my years and most of that was spent doing PHP. However just recently I have noticed a new major point in time – a new era of PHP frameworks. Seems like everything is changing these days. I want to discuss what I think the current state is, what [...]

In one of my previous posts I wrote about Real time notifications with PHP. I wanted to create a simple comet system fully written in PHP and JavaScript. It worked but as Scott Mattocks told me in a comment this implementation was still just doing short polling. [...]

Model, View, Controller. If you’ve ever tried Ruby on Rails, those words have probably been drilled into your head a thousand times over. On the other hand, if this is new to you, there’s plenty of resources on Nettuts+ for beginners – but this is not one of them. [...]

A comparison of weave with NumPy, Pyrex, Psyco, Fortran (77 and 90) and C++ for solving Laplace’s equation. [...]

Observing the NoSQL hype through the eyes of an SQL performance consultant is an interesting experience. It is, however, very hard to write about NoSQL because there are so many forms of it. [...]