Think Different

How McGill University's Department of Development and Alumni Relations supports up to 160,000 users over the web using PHP and Oracle At McGill University's (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) Department of Development and Alumni Relations, we are in the process of moving extensive, multifaceted services for 200 to 300 paid and volunteer staff and up to 160,000 alumni and donors to the Web using an industrial-str ength PHP application and Oracle9i. It is expected that the program will accommodate tens of thousands of users per hour following major e-broadcasts. We are doing this using Oracle's powerful row-level security features and PHP's high performance and quick development platform. This article will address the following: * Background * Why we chose PHP, Oracle9i, Apache, and Linux * Structure of the application * Security * Synchronization * Lessons learned and advice to developers. Background Our organization faces what many do: * A central database application that is ...