Apache Ant Best Practices
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Apache Ant is a powerful build tool. This week you'll learn what Ant property files are, how to use Ant's capabilities to better integrate with IBM Rational ClearCase, how to implement Ant build files and more. By Kevin A. Lee. 0717
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LONDON - When an ant comes to the fork in the road, it uses geometry to find the correct path, scientists say. Worker pharaoh ants use a series of branching paths scented with pheromones to travel around their colony.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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(Source: HP)  This white paper provides tips and tricks for HP LoadRunner software configuration, scripting, and execution. This guide is intended to help testers just learning to use LoadRunner, as well as to provide new best practices for those who have used LoadRunner for many years.
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In a new tutorial on the Developer.com website today, they explore the difference between (and the benefits and disadvantages of) the singleton pattern versus threading in a PHP application.   Although you probably could address some [of these] issues with the judicious use of synchronized blocks, do not overlook the utility of the ThreadLocal class. In this article, I will demonstrate the risk of not accounting for Threads when using a singleton pattern and show how simple it is to address.   They start with the creation of a ThreadLocal class, one that allows the developer to communicate with the threads, and its usage. In contrast, they also create the Singleton class, showing the creation method of multiple objects of the same type.   They do, however, point out an issue that the threaded method has - unreliable results. Help is on the horizon, though, in the form of a HelperFactory class to manage the connections a bit more efficiently.
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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:WaxJelly Blog: Simple PHP script using the YouTube API (with pagination)DevShed: Uploading Files and Navigating Directories in PHPPHPit.net: PHP5 Class Basics, Part 1SpinDrop.us: Using Zend Search Lucene in a symfony appCommunity News: PHP Appalachia IRC ChannelZend Developer Zone: Work with XML Data in the Zend FrameworkColdScripts.com: Mapping Framework PopularityWaxJelly Blog: A More Complex PHP script using the YouTube API (with video details) PART 2KillerPHP Blog: PHP Interfaces: when and why you should use them instead of classes?PHP-Tools Blog: Analyzing aide (advanced intrusion detection environment) output with PHPZend Developer Zone: Pro PHP XML and Web Services Sample ChapterZend Developer Zone: Cool Image Thumbnail ClassNefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 4: PHP5's Improved FeaturesSebastian Bergmann's Blog: Zend/PHP Conference 2006William Candillon's Blog: phpAspect presented at the EPFL
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(Source: Fluke Networks)  This white paper describes best practices to ensure SNMPv3 migration improves security and makes ongoing monitoring easier and more accurate.
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Jan Lehnardt has been working up a REST controller for a PHP application he's been developing and has posted a minimalistic structure for one he's worked up.   One of the projects involves very little code and I do not want to use a full fledged framework there. Another one is using Code Igniter which does not handle REST by default (as far as I can tell). So I wrote a minimal REST application controller that easy to integrate and very flexible.   His example makes a base class that is extended by each of the controllers needing REST functionality. It includes methods for dispatching, error handling, responding and passing the call to the right handler.
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Continuing on in their series of working with stand alone PHP scripts, DevShed has posted this third and last part looking at the creation of a basic script you can use to monitor your server (an excerpt from Advances PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle).   Last week, we continued our discussion of PHP standalone scripts with child processes and more. This week, we conclude our discussion and bring together what you've learned.   They start with the creation of a very basic daemon, including permission restrictions. They then modify this heavily to support the monitoring of processes through various parameters like frequency, status_time, and a description of the service. They then create the full example script and show the usage by checking to see if a URL passed in can be opened.   They also include, as a bonus, another more useful script that will email someone when the specified service goes down (still a HTTP check, though).
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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The Java Parallel Processing Framework is a grid framework for Java, focused on performance and ease of use.   The JPPF team has the pleasure to announce a new maintenance release.  The communications and execution performance was increased by 10% Numerous bugs were fixed in the server, increasing its stability and scalability. A bug was fixed in the distributed class loader, that would cause the client to crash. The graphical administration console was upgraded to use Substance L&F v3.1 and JFreeChart v1.0.3  The files for this release can be dowloaded from this location: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=135654 The project home page can be found here: http://jppf-project.sourceforge.net/ Documentation on the project can be found here: http://jppf-project.sourceforge.net/wiki
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In this new post, Justin Silverton shares a few helpful hints for creating high performance applications in PHP:  use multi resultset queries to your database rather than many small ones page/object caching gzip compression tune your web server Don't save performance testing for the end of the project  Each of the items has explanation and links to more details on them (including links to three difference object caching applications - ion cube, alternative PHP cache, turck MMCache).
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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In a new article on DevShed, the spotlight is on putting Apache "in jail" with chroot, but they also include a section on setting up PHP to work inside it.   In this conclusion to a six-part series on Apache configuration and installation, you will learn how to use chroot to put Apache in jail, how to prepare PHP to work in jail, and more.    The article is an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Apache Security" and shows how to get PHP to cooperate by installing it normally and then setting up some shared libraries to be used in the jail. They note one common problem - an issue with PHP accessing sendmail - that can be solved easily with a change to php.ini for the setup.
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Chris Hartjes has a quick post (but complete with code) about moving files around a bit differently than the norm - it's his method for using a HTTP-PUT to push a file out.   A work project is getting close to 0.1 status. Pretty underwhelming, I know. One of the last 'milestones' for 0.1 is taking these wonderful XML documents that my web app creates and sends them to an internal web service. This web service will accept documents via an HTTP PUT [...] so I dug around a bit on the web and put together some code.   The code is a generic "publish" method that opens a stream to the remote server and, in a binary format, pushes the contents of a local file and parses out the response.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).