Message Queues in Node.js
Message queues are becoming increasingly common in web applications, since they provide a nice way to process data offline – i.e. outside of the synchronous HTTP flow. In a very simplified manner, the...
View ArticleLiving with Gentoo
About a year ago I switched from Ubuntu to Gentoo. It was a bit of an experimental switch, but I must confess I am now a convert – I’ve got it running on my development machine at work, at home, …...
View ArticleMulti-threaded node.js message queue consumers
So far, in my investigation of node.js and Service-Oriented Architecture, I have shown that node.js can be successfully used to consume messages from a queue as part of a wider service. However, one of...
View ArticleConcurrent PHP Sessions
Sessions in PHP are handled by the $_SESSION superglobal and several session_*() functions. One thing you may not realise about PHP sessions though, is that natively they are blocking to make them...
View ArticleNode.js vs PHP Performance – Maths
Node.js has a reputation of being a very efficient framework, and most of the discussions around this focus on its event-driven nature, rather than the engine itself. I think it’s pretty obvious to...
View ArticleNode.js vs PHP Performance – JSON Decoding
In the last article, we saw that when it comes to maths, node.js was nearly 50x faster than PHP. This time, we’re going to look at JSON – a data format at the core of several modern technologies such...
View ArticleMigrating from lighttpd to nginx
This site currently runs from a relatively low-spec VPS running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. With just 1GB memory, it is running several websites as well as various other servers – mail, database, VCS, etc. I set...
View ArticleRecursive Closures in PHP
Here’s a useful trick I came across a while back for using closures in PHP. For those people who aren’t aware of this, starting from PHP 5.3, it is possible to create an anonymous function and assign...
View ArticleOptimising Zend_Config
Zend Framework is a popular MVC framework written in PHP. There has been substantial development on it over the past couple of years, and it is now often used in enterprise environments to power...
View ArticleDifferentiating between Apple mobile devices programmatically
It is fairly well known that Apple gives very little information away in the User Agent. All it really surrenders is the device family (e.g. iPhone, iPad, iPod) and the iOS version. There is an ongoing...
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