Yearly Archives: 2009

Long development cycles of compiled languages – the real killer

By Ben | Published: September 4, 2009
Ever asked yourself what are the reasons for the rise of scripting  languages like PHP, Ruby, Groovy for web development in the last couple of years? Let’s take the concrete case of Java. Common critiques of the language and the API’s, and the J2EE/JEE frameworks were/are in a loose historical order: performance – too slow: [...]
Posted in java, programming languages, Web2.0 | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Scaling Enterprise Applications and all that jazz: Terracotta, GigaSpaces, and Azul

By Ben | Published: August 22, 2009
I like scaling and the architectures that attempt to solve those issues. Below I tried to bullet point 3 prominent players in this area, all solving scaling problems with different architectures at different levels. Terracotta 3.1 Clustering JVM using Network attached Memory Only the field-level changes are sent over the network Uses TCP to communicate within [...]
Posted in Scalability, Terracotta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Discovered Quercus

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
Scalability, security, pooling, long lived connections , container services in general are all aspects where Java has a lot to offer. PHP on the other side is good for fast development cycles with a low maintenance infrastructure, request response orientend with not so much support for long lived connections, caching etc. Read the full post [...]
Posted in java, php, Scalability | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Copyright reloaded

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
I found this article recently. Quite funny the copyright symbol designer sues e.g. RIAA for using his artwork whereas RIAA itself sees itself something like the holy grail of copyright. Permanent link to this post (31 words)
Posted in Distractions | Tagged | Comments closed

FB Series: AJAX & Facebook debugging

By Ben | Published: August 17, 2009
The php facebook client has a nice setting to track the different http calls between your app and facebook. You can enable this with: $GLOBALS['facebook_config']['debug'] = true; This will actually insert some script code to the header of every page served, in order to render the tracking code, if there is something to render: Read [...]
Posted in debugging, facebook | Tagged , | Comments closed

Internet-scale Java Web Applications

By ben | Published: July 22, 2009
I am currently working on 2 application architectures. One is a PHP Facebook app (IFrame) with Postgresql in the backend, the other is a Glassfish/Jersey/Toplink/PostgreSql stack. When reading the glowing web 2.0 tech stories in the news and sites like highscalability it seems like just about everyone requiring a “internet-scale” architecture is using MySQL, many [...]
Posted in EC2, Scalability, Terracotta, Web2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

FB Series: Integrating JS

By ben | Published: July 18, 2009
Where are we coming from Javascript one of the most popular language for web programming. Although it has been around for decades, – coming from Netscape 1995 – it was not until the advent of the Ajax and Web 2.0 when JavaScript came to the spotlight and brought more professional programming attention. The OpenSource movement [...]
Posted in facebook, javascript | Tagged , | Comments closed

FB Series: Choosing an PHP IDE

By ben | Published: July 18, 2009
What are the contenders? Netbeans 6.7 with PHP supportAptana 1.5 (standalone or Eclipse plugin)Zend Studio 6.1.2 (not free ;( ) My experiences: Code completion/parser in Netbeans better than Aptana (Aptana also crashes / gets in a endless loop at points when it cannot parse / code assist a file resulting in java heap exhaustion / [...]
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FB Series: Java Guy starting with FB development

By ben | Published: July 18, 2009
I recently started with PHP development. Although I have had some small exposure to the language before, this was my first real project. What are the big differences to the Java (web) development experience? interpreted (no compiler to check for errors, just a parser) dynamically typed (->no “parse-time” type checking in the IDE ..) essential [...]
Posted in facebook, php | Tagged , , | Comments closed

FB Series: Locally debug your PHP Facebook App

By ben | Published: July 10, 2009
Starting with Facebook applications is a rather a bumpy road. First there is the scattered and often not up-to-date documentation on the Facebook wiki. Its a pain to go through. But ok once you managed to get the important bits its ok. What I am talking about is the testing. Its quite astonishing that this [...]
Posted in facebook, php | Tagged , , | Comments closed