Think Different

The NASA Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS) ( http://nais.nasa.gov/ ) is responsible for providing the general public with information regarding contract opportunities with the revered space organization. A network of servers interconnecting 12 of NASA's field installations, NAIS is the only means for obtaining acquisition information for contracts ranging between $25,000 and $500,000. Saving NASA and its partners roughly $4 million annually, the NAIS model has been so successful that it has been adopted by the U.S. FedBizOpps program ( http://www.eps.gov/ ) as a means for providing access to contracting opportunities for the entire U.S. Government. Furthermore, NAIS supports several thousand users, and receives on average 300,000 hits each month. Given NAIS' mission-critical purpose at NASA, quite a few heads turned when they announced the successful conversion of the NASA Acquisition Internet Service database backend from Oracle to MySQL. Restructuring of Orac...

Istockphoto.com is the biggest royalty-free stock photo community in the world, and its sister company, istockpro.com, is home to a host of illustrious professional photographers. Every week, approximately 5,000 photographers upload more than 2,500 photos (2.5 GB) to MySQL® -- the world's most popular open source database -- and approximately 1,250(1.25 GB) are accepted and posted to istock Web sites. More than 200,000 customers, including corporations, advertising and public relations agencies, and individuals access these photo databases and download 20-30 GB daily for a variety of uses. The MySQL database tracks every photo submitted and manages the permissions and billing, all for the fraction of the cost of traditional database systems. "We operate a classic LAMP system," says Patrick Lor, executive vice president. "MySQL enables us to grow our business at a rate of 15 to 30 percent a month. “A traditional database would have required at lea...

Introduction Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software. Developers building with Platform scale their own applications using many of the same infrastructure technologies that power Facebook. Platform Our Platform engineering team has released and maintains open source SDKs for Android , C# , iPhone , JavaScript , PHP , and Python . Developer tools codemod assists with large-scale codebase refactors that can be partially automated but still require human oversight and occasional intervention. Facebook Animation is a JavaScript library for creating customizable animations using DOM and CSS manipulation. flvtool++ is a tool for hinting and manipulating the metadata of FLV files. It was originally created for Facebook Video . Online Schema Change for MySQL lets you alter large database tables without taking your cluster offline. PHPEmbed makes embedding PHP truly simple for all of our developers (and indeed the world) we de...

irontec have just launched an open source project to bring PHP to Android platform. PHP for Android project (PFA) aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasable providing tools and documentation. The project already have an APK which provides PHP support to Android Scripting Environment (ASE). To get started you can follow the screencast below : APK and source code both available at http://phpforandroid.net . Minimum requirement to get PHP for Android running is Android 1.5 phone or emulator. There is even an unofficial ASE build with PHP 5.3 support included. Now Rasmus can get an Android phone and start scripting on mobile.

iPFaces is a flexible solution for easy development of form-oriented network mobile applications. With the iPFaces solution, mobile devices are able to render content received from a server using their native UI components. It uses thin presentation client (must be installed on device) to render application content. Using iPFaces it is possible to build an application where users can use their device's specific component behavior and additional device features, such as location service and additional graphic components of the device (lists, pickers etc.). Architecture The solution is based on the use of a thin presentation client installed on the device and an application/web server which generates the content for clients. The client and the server communicate with each other using the network. The idea is similar to the web browser - web server model. The client sends HTTP(S) requests to the server and receives iPFaces specific HTTP(S) respons...

One of the key goals we set ourselves when we developed the new iPlayer was that it would have to be fast to use. We understand that any delay in getting you to the video is frustrating as the site is just a jumping off point into TV and Radio content. But how do we make things fast? Displaying a web page in the browser contains many steps, some we can control some we can't. Time spent for the request and response travelling over the network we can't control, but we can control how long the pages take to generate and how large they are. We also have a degree of control over how long those pages can take to render in your browser. We had our work cut out for us on the new version of iPlayer. Personalised websites require much more processing power and data storage The current site uses one back-end service that we pull data from to build the pages. The new site uses many more, and we both post and pull data from them. This means that every returning user gets a differ...

PHP in the enterprise PHP claims to be the most widely used programming language on the web. A quick look at http://langpop.com/ supports this – it’s almost certainly the most common for smaller web projects. PHP was not originally designed as an enterprise-level language, but as it has evolved, it has become suitable for much larger projects than were originally envisaged when Rasmus Lerdorf produced PHP/FI in 1995 (source). PHP now supports SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON and any database platform you care to mention. For something to be considered “Enterprise-level”, i.e. ready for use in the enterprise, it should meet the criteria of the Enterprise Challenges examined in our previous blog post. PHP as an Enterprise-level language With PHP 5.3, PHP is a full object oriented language with exception handling and useful features such as closures. Let’s take a look at PHP in light of enterprise challenges. Scalability PHP is very scalable owing to its shared nothing architecture – ...

Matt McDonnell wrote about the new BBC Topic Pages Beta . I'd now like explain how some of the many components that build those pages all work together. The point of the Topic Pages is that they bring together content from all around bbc.co.uk . Obviously, many different systems produce all that content, and in general they don't tend to share content very well. Our challenge was to build a platform that could make sense of the different interfaces to those systems to make sharing that content easier. The first thing to note is that the Topic Pages themselves are dynamic , unlike the vast majority of pages on bbc.co.uk. Essentially, this means that the HTML of the page isn't stored as a physical file on a hard-disk, but instead is built up dynamically when the page is requested. This is done by the "Page Assembly Layer" or "PAL", a brand new component written in the PHP programming language . In the future, the intention is that most pages on bbc.c...

The World Cup 2010 website is a significant step change in the way that content is published. From first using the site, the most striking changes are the horizontal navigation and the larger, format high-quality video. As you navigate through the site it becomes apparent that this is a far deeper and richer use of content than can be achieved through traditional CMS-driven publishing solutions. The site features 700-plus team, group and player pages, which are powered by a high-performance dynamic semantic publishing framework. This framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories. Dynamic aggregation examples include: Frank Lampard England Squad Group C Fixtures and Results Groups and Teams The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata . Th...

The Zend Framework, developed by Zend Technologies is an open-source, object oriented web-application framework implemented in PHP 5. It is widely known as ZF and is developed with the purpose of making things easier for PHP developers and supporting best practices at the same time. CakePHP too, is an open-source web application framework used for creating web applications written in PHP. It is developed by Cake Software Foundation, Inc. It is written in PHP and is based on the model of Ruby on Rails. Zend Framework has easy methods of licensing with the new BSD license and a swift and well-tested code base that your business can rely upon. It makes use of commonly available APIs from well known vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and API providers and catalogers such as StrikeIron and Programmable Web. ZF offers a simple component library to provide 80 percent of the functionality mostly needed by developers. The rest of the 20 percent can be altered as per your requirement...

The Zend Framework, developed by Zend Technologies is an open-source, object oriented web-application framework implemented in PHP 5. It is widely known as ZF and is developed with the purpose of making things easier for PHP developers and supporting best practices at the same time. CakePHP too, is an open-source web application framework used for creating web applications written in PHP. It is developed by Cake Software Foundation, Inc. It is written in PHP and is based on the model of Ruby on Rails. Zend Framework has easy methods of licensing with the new BSD license and a swift and well-tested code base that your business can rely upon. It makes use of commonly available APIs from well known vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and API providers and catalogers such as StrikeIron and Programmable Web. ZF offers a simple component library to provide 80 percent of the functionality mostly needed by developers. The rest of the 20 percent can be altered as per your requirement...

I ndia has potential to emerge as the global competency centre for cloud services, says Microsoft. India , with its powerful ecosystem of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISVs), 1.4 million developers and more than 11000 system integrators (SIs and custom software development organizations), is ideal to tap this growing opportunity. As a result, an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5 years. A study by global consultants, Zinnov estimates the global cloud computing market to be over $70 billion by 2015. Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation said, "India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage, but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing." Microsoft's cloud infrastructure supports over one billion customers and 20 million businesses globally. Leaders from the industry and academia a...

It has emerged that the IP addresses used in helping to distinguish one computer from another are expected to run out in approximately 500 days. The unique numbers, which are known as Internet protocol addresses, help identify the world's networked devices. An IP address uses four numbers from 0 to 255 to distinguish one computer from another. As an example, computers around the world can recognise the IP address 203.26.51.71 as a server for fairfax.com.au, which publishes this newspaper online. There are more than four billion combinations. But the proliferation of networked devices means soon that will no longer be enough. In a way, IP addresses are like phone numbers, which need to be entered correctly if a right connection is to be made. So the ability to uniquely identify everything in the computer world is essential. IP addresses are like phone numbers in another way, too. Just as Australia [ Images ] had to move from seven-digit phone numbers to eight digits in the early 199...

To add customiged fields for shop customer.. First We can make a module to extend the functionality of the customer module already in magento. First adding the module xml file to the app/etc/modules/ directory. You need to decide on a module name. In this example we will use the Sarvottom scope, and call the module 'NewCustomer'. Therefore we need to create a file named Sarvottom_NewCustomer.xml and add the following content: <code> <config> <modules> <Sarvottom_NewCustomer> <active>true</active> <codePool>local</codePool> </Sarvottom_NewCustomer> </modules> </config> </code> Second to add the above file means that Magento is now aware of a new custom module been added as local module. Now, we need to create the module itself, which must be located in the app/code/local/Sarvottom/NewCustomer directory. Inside this directory, create an etc directory...

Magento has always been flying forward with code optimization and adding new features. Recently I’ve been tasked with upgrading one of our websites from 1.2 to 1.3.2 Seems like alot has changed since that time, no core changes are now required, you can overwrite code functionality with your own controllers, and etc.. Awesome! So lets move forward. How would you disable shipping and payment steps for you Magento installation and apply changes in such manner that you wont have to worry about this when doing the next Magento upgrade? Below is a step by step tutorial “copy paste” pretty much. Now I don’t expect this that this solution will always work with next version of Magento , but unless they deprecate some existing functionality I’m sure you wont need to change anything. NOTE: When doing copy paste make sure you wont end up with weird characters, such as single and double quotes. STEP 1 First step would be to get a Magento extension called “LKC_ModularRouters” (ext. ke...