Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics - Zend's Drupal Benchmarks
Submitted by Keith Casey on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 14:26Today I was passed a whitepaper titled "Optimizing Drupal Performance - Benchmark Results" from a joint Zend and Acquia effort. The quick summary is pretty clear and straightforward:
This paper presents the results of performance benchmarks for comparing several common PHP runtime environments and configurations. The application used for benchmarking is Drupal, the open source social publishing platform.
Announcing our support for Facebook's HipHop
Submitted by Keith Casey on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 13:11By now everyone in the PHP community - and most technical leads at companies who rely on PHP - should have heard about Facebook's revolutionary new open source tool, HipHop. HipHop, like PHP itself, stands the chance of being a serious game changing technology. Their stated goal was to allow their developers to continue to enjoy the speed of development that PHP gives them while improving the overall performance of their application by transforming it into C++. The resulting "transformed and compiled" application can be up to 50% faster than the native PHP application.
There have been attempts in the past to create a PHP compiler to try and improve its speed. There are two points that set HipHop apart from the pack though.
Getting Started with Zend_Test
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 19:12I worked on a project recently where we used Zend Framework. As part of that project, I was tasked with writing unit tests. So, I went to the "tests" directory generated for me by the zf CLI utility to get started. What I found there was three files.
Microsoft Web Developer Summit 2009 Recap
Submitted by Keith Casey on Wed, 12/09/2009 - 15:36Last week I had the opportunity to visit a little company in Redmond and hear about what they're doing in the PHP world, what they're doing in Open Source, and generally share some feedback. This was my seond year being invited but my first year to attend.
The Good
First of all, the entire event was well-run and executed. OSS Dev Strategy Lead Karri Dunn and the event manager Tanya Young both did a fantastic job of putting the whole thing together and lining up numerous great presenters and events in a great location. The Developer and Platform Evangelists (DPE in MSese) - namely Peter Laudati, Will Coleman, and Josh Holmes - were great hosts and kept things moving.
WordCampNYC 2009 Recap
Submitted by Keith Casey on Tue, 11/17/2009 - 05:25This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend WordCamp NYC 2009. Overall, it was a blast but there are some specific sessions and people I'd like to point out as particular stand outs.
First, Raphael Mudge - a local DCian - talked about his tool After the Deadline. It's a plugin that ties into TinyMCE to perform in-context spelling and grammar checking. I haven't had a chance to look at it in more than passing, but it looks impressive. And for some reason, I ended up on his "The 10 People you Meet" post. It's probably because I asked him to speak at DCPHP next month.
Part 14: Site Management Offering
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Fri, 10/09/2009 - 15:24Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento, unless otherwise explicitly stated.
This post is the fourteenth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the site management features. Several of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.
Part 13: Marketing Promotions and Tools Offering
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 07:14Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento.
This post is the thirteenth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the marketing promotions and tools features. The majority of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.
Part 12: International Support Offering
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 07:10Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento.
This post is the twelfth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the international support features.
Part 11: Search Engine Optimization Offering
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Thu, 09/17/2009 - 08:12Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento.
This post is the eleventh part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the search engine optimization features.
Part 10: Checkout Offering
Submitted by Matthew Turland on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 07:46Note: All references to the user guide in this post refer to the public user guide available on the Magento wiki, as opposed to the user guide book for the Enterprise Edition of Magento.
This post is the tenth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it reviews the checkout features.
