Think Different

The internally-developed HipHop for PHP source code transformer is being offered via open source Technologists at Facebook on Tuesday are releasing a source code transformer intended to boost the performance of PHP . In development for the past two years, the technology, called HipHop for PHP, has been used to reduce the CPU usage on Facebook Web servers by an average of about 50 percent, said Haiping Zhao, senior server engineer at Facebook. [ InfoWorld reported on PHP 6 highlights, including internationalization, that were detailed at a technical conference late last year. ] "The project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large, complex Web sites with PHP," Zhao said in a statement on the Facebook Developers page . The technology is not complete and users need to be comfortable with HipHop before trying it ...

Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP helps developers build apps for Web, desktop, and mobile systems, including Apple's iOS devices. But you can use Eclipse with plug-in available along with Flex sdk to compile in Eclipse itself. Zend Technologies and Adobe Systems today announced Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP, which enables developers to use PHP and Flash development skills to build rich Internet applications for mobile, Web, and desktop platforms. The product provides an IDE combining Adobe's Flash Builder 4.5, for ActionScript-based Flash client development, and Zend Studio 8, for server-side PHP capabilities. Accentuating the use for mobile deployments, the two vendors said applications can be delivered to Google Android, Research in Motion BlackBerry Tablet OS, and Apple iOS systems. For iOS, the IDE exports the applications into native code, rather than run in an the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software, which Apple prohibits on iOS. Android apps are also exported to a na...

Developers still see it as the future, but they think it is currently overhyped and vendor-driven While technology vendors continue to pound home the message of cloud computing, PHP developers Tuesday viewed the concept as overhyped and were not in agreement on its benefits. Developers at the ZendCon 2010 PHP conference in Santa, Clara, Calif., heard Zend Technologies CEO Andi Gutmans tout the company's cloud computing plans, which involve developing Zend PHP Cloud Platform. During his presentation, however, developers appeared mostly underwhelmed when Gutmans asked if cloud computing was game-changing or just hype. Afterward, developers gave cloud computing mixed reviews. [ Oracle discussed its cloud plans on Monday . | Stay on top of the latest app dev news with the Developer World newsletter . ] "I guess I have a feeling that 10, 15 years from now, maybe we'll all be using this stuff, but right now, it's entirely pushed by vendors," said Phillip ...

Google has released the code for WebRTC, a voice and video codec for the Web Google has released the source code for a technology that it hopes developers will use to embed real-time video and voice chat functionality in their Web applications. Google acquired the technology, called WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication), when it purchased VoIP (Voice over IP) software developer Global IP Solutions in 2010, for approximately $68.2 million. The company said it would open source the technology early last month. [ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog and Technology: Open Source newsletter . ] WebRTC is a set of voice and video signal processing technologies, which can be accessed by developers through HTML tags and JavaScript APIs (application programming interfaces). Today, Internet audio and video chat services from companies such as Skype are chiefly proprietary, accessible through plug-ins and client downloads. Last month, Micros...

When developing a Web application, it's standard practice to create a database structure on which server-side code is placed for the logic and UI layers. To connect to the database, the server-side code needs to do some basic creating, updating, deleting, and — most importantly — reading of records. As databases behind Web applications are typically relational databases, these CRUD operations are done using the well-known language, SQL. However, as Web development is increasingly occurring through object-oriented programming (OOP), the model is changing. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a perfect way to describe objects while maintaining the meaning of that data. Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL — pronounced "sparkle") is the language typically used to query against that data, as it syntactically matches the structure of RDF itself. Both RDF and SPARQL are technologies within what has been dubbed the Semantic Web stack. To fully e...

Not everyone agrees on exactly what Web 2.0 entails. As with all great buzzwords and concepts, people are already predicting what Web 3.0 will be. Will rich internet applications dominate it? RIAs are still in their infancy, but when done right they're incredibly powerful tools. When Google launched Google Maps a few years ago, it opened people's eyes to the fact that web browsers can do much more than merely display pictures and text. Currently, there are four mainstream mechanisms being used to develop RIAs. AJAX/JavaScript: AJAX is a web development technique for using JavaScript with XML to create a rich internet application by dynamically and asynchronously exchanging data in the background without having to refresh the page. Google Maps and Gmail demonstrated what could be done with simple existing technologies like JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all now promote their own AJAX toolkits to assist in building AJAX-rich media functionality. Flas...

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...