Clearly, the world needs another blog, and especially one by an arrogant opinionated developer that thinks he knows better than most. This is that blog

While I’ve had my LJ for a while, that has never been the right place for some highly technical posts, so, frankly years late, I’ve decided to start this up. This will be the home for my technical discussions, suggestions, links to some very interesting posts I’ve seen elsewhere (hopefully good), and more than the odd rant, about other developers, technologies and anything else that’s vaguely related.

If it involves the flowing of electrons, it’s pretty much fair game.

I'm taking a slight diversion now, to show you how the main worker processor runs. There are two parts to it - the actual worker, written in PHP, and the script that keeps running it. Continue reading "Doing the work elsewhere - Sidebar - running the worker"

The use of Beanstalkd as a queueing system

What is an asynchronous queue

The classic wikipedia quote (Message queue)

In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components used for interprocess communication, or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. Group communication systems provide similar kinds of functionality.

So one part of a system puts a message into a queue for another part to read from, and then act upon. The asynchronous nature means that each side is otherwise independent from the other, and does not wait for a response. That independence is an important part of the nature of the system though – and we’ll see later how some of the more advanced functionality for our software of choice here can give some extraordinary flexibility to what can be done.

Continue reading "Doing the work elsewhere - Asynchronous Message Queues"

Phew. That would have been embarrassing if I’d not passed my ZCE on Thursday afternoon.

The rant on how useful it actually is though, will be coming early next week.

Just a quick note on what is going to be posted in the next few weeks – I’ve got a few significant pieces in mind for various topics – including:

• Doing the work elsewhere – asynchronous queues

This is going to be a series of articles – and to support it, I’m rewriting some code that I had originally wrote for my last job (v2, and so significantly improved over the original). First though, I’ll tell you what is planned, and just how asynchronous queues are used and how they can be incredibly useful for scaling up any significant website, and not just in the obvious ways.

• Mail queuing, on a vast scale

Dave Marshall has just posted an entry on “Using message queues to improve user experience”: http://www.davedevelopment.co.uk/2009/06/01/using-message-queues-to-improve-user-experience/ where he queues up some emails in order to spool them out over the course of a few minutes. For the last 18 months, I’d been doing something very similar, on a far larger scale, with PEAR’s Mail_Queue. I’ll show you how I did it and I’ll show you how the messages were generated quickly, and how they could be sent out – and more importantly without destroying the system it was running on. As a bonus, I’ll show you how if you run some form of internal mail system, you could save gigabytes of database space and give yourself vastly more flexibility.

• Self stubbing mocks

Using the Mocking functionality in PHPunit & Simpletest can be complicated with the various calls that are required. There’s just not much documentation around the PHP-world on how to run it. Another method, which can be easier to understand, is self-stubbing – putting your code into the test class. I’ll show some examples of how to do that.

Finally, I’m going to be doing my ZCE exam in the next week or two – quite possibly on Thursday 3rd June. Keep a close eye here, and on my Twitter @topbit for the results, and a follow-up.

Back at the PHP London Conference at the end of February, iBuildings was offering a little test, with prize for people that could do well answering the sort of questions that are on the ZCE exam. Never one to turn down something for free, I took ten minutes to answer the eight questions. A few weeks later, I get an email from them/Zend to say I’d won the chance to take an exam – ZCE, or ZFE (Zend Framework). Although I use ZF, I don’t know it well enough to begin to pass any exam, so as I’ve still not had the chance to take it, I figured, why not take it on their dime?

About 14 months ago, I’d bought 5 tries on the PHPArch-based ‘Vulcan’ test prep exam. Today, I’ve come back to it, and gone through it again. Like last time, the test (practice and real) is scheduled to take up to 90 minutes, but I had whipped through them all in 45 minutes, I have finished the 70 questions.

I’m amused by the fact the only part of this I failed was ‘Basic Language’. The first time around it was design patterns. Either way, now I’ve got some time, I’m going to schedule the test for quite possibly later this week and see about getting the paperwork for it.

It’s also still 7 ‘EXCELLENT’s, and a fail – just in different places :-)

Category	Grade
XML & Web Services	PASS
Arrays	PASS
Web Features	EXCELLENT
Basic Language	FAIL
Streams and Network Programming	PASS
Database Access	PASS
String Manipulation and Regular Expressions	EXCELLENT
PHP 4/5 differences	EXCELLENT
Security	EXCELLENT
OOP	EXCELLENT
Functions	EXCELLENT
Design	EXCELLENT

Overall : EXCELLENT