Internet Strategy Guide

It's been about a week or so since tekx ended and I figured that (since I didn't do one last year) I should put my own personal thoughts down. This was my second year at tekx and I was looking forward to the conference and it did not disappoint my expectations. Oh yeah, I'm going to write like my live blogs were and do mostly stream of thought with as little editting as possible. Want the TLDR version? It was fucking awesome, you should berate yourself for not finding a way to go and resolve to be there next year.

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Closing remarks will be given by Marco Tabini (@mtabini).

User groups are the lifeblood of the PHP community. I need to figure out how to start a user group in the Bloomington, Indiana area. I meant to last year but with figure a public declaration will motivate me more.

This year there was a lot of submissions for sessions. Next year and for conferences in general, if you have an idea for a talk, you should put your paper in. Don't be afraid that people won't want to hear about it.

Short and sweet closing so we get to eat now.

Talk is by Elizabeth Marie Smith (@auroraeosrose).

PHP is officially supported on:

• Unix
• Windows
• Linux
• Embedded Systems
• Risc
• NetWare
• I5 (or whatever it's called this week)

PHP is starting to drop support for old systems. Like 5.3 won't run on Windows 2000. So try to keep up to date. "If you're running PHP 4, GTFO"

If you write your code right and you get a crazy manager that decides to move, you don't have to deal with the headaches. For the most part, PHP takes care of the hard stuff. You just need to know the edge cases and know the key differences.

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Ben Ramsey (@ramsey) is giving a talk over memcache and APC. You use a cache to reduce the retrieval queries to the database, to reduce the number of requests made to external services, to reduce the time spent computing data and to reduce filesystem access.

Types of caches

• file system
• database
• shared memory
• RAM disk
• object cache (memcached and APC)
• Opcode cache (APC)

Memcached was created for livejournal as a way to solve having to making too many reads to their database. Memcached is a daemon that acts as a simple key/value dictionary.

Who uses it?

• facebook
• digg
• youtube
• wikipedia
• moontoast
• many others

Principles

• fast asynchronous network I/O
• NOT a persistent data store
• It does not provide redundancy
• data is not replicated across the cluster
• It doesn't handle failover

Daemons are not aware of each other. It does not provide authentication so you shouldn't put themin public areas. They work great on a small and local-area network. A single value can not contain more than 1MB of data. Keys are strings limited to 250 characters.

Simple protocol with storage commands: set,add,replace,append,prepend, cas; retrival: get,gets; deletion: delete;increment/decrements: incr,decr; other: stats,flush_all,version, verbosity, quit.

default port is 11211.

there is a PECL memcache extension, the example is using the PECL memcached example. There is an important distinction. the memcached extention gives you extra information like if the item isn't found.

Missed the APC part of the talk b/c I'm allergic to something there or coming down with something. Either way, was sneezing up a storm and feeling miserable. Skipped rest of the talk so I wouldn't be disruptive.

@lig will be talking about mysql 5.5 and scalability this session She is Senior Technical Support Engineer for MySQL.

We will be covering

• semi-synchronous replication
• performance schema
• SIGNAL/RESIGNAL
• more partitioning options
• InnoDB - LOTS of InnoDB (performance and scalability improvements)

In 5.5 InnoDB will be the default!!! WOOT.

Default replication is asynchronous. Meaning master writes to binary log and the slave connects and "pulls" contents of the binary log. Bad thing is if the master crashes, there's no guarantee that a slave has all committed transanction.

Simi-Synchronous Replication is an alternative to asynchronous replication. Midway point between asynchronous and fully syncronous. Master only waits for a slave to receive an event. Don't have to wait for slaves to actually commit.

Performance schema tracks at an extremely low level. Just like Information schema, tables are views or temporary tables. Activation doesn't cause any change in server behavior. This is designed for advanced users.

Think of SIGNAL as an exception, a way to "return" an error. You get exception-handling logic for stored procedures, stored functions, triggers,events and db apps.

RESIGNAL lets you pass error information up. Think of it as a catch. Requres an active handler to execute. Lets you program on your PHP side to catch that very specific handling.

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@auroraeosrose's talk. Going over definitions so that everyone is on the same page.

Everything uses streams

• include/require
• stream functions
• file system functions
• many other extensions

What is a stream in php? They allow you access input and output very generically. You can read and write linearly and may or may not be seekable. Comes in chunks of data. Think of a 15GB file, would you want to read that into memory? Of course not, PHP will laugh at you for being stupid.

Thank Sara Goleman and Wez Furlong for the awesomeness of streams.

Edit: Originally didn't get Wez's name in the presentation, he thankfully provided me with his identity.

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Matthew Turland is presenting. If you haven't heard of him, you're a nub (k, not really but I really wanted to put that in a post somewhere). He's an auther for php|architect and author of Web Scrapign with PHP, a contributer to Zend Framework, lead developer of Phergie. So yeah, kind of a big deal. He currently works at Synacor which provides internet solutions to ISPs, media companies and advertisers.

The biggest change to SPL in 5.3 is the containers. Why containers? Arrays aren't always great. The underlying hash table algorithm is not always ideal for the task at hand.

We'll be looking at a lot of benchmarks. The code is available on github so you can compare the performance results for yourself.

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Today's session is given by derick rethans, the author of xdebug so he might know what he's talking about.

Xdebug provides protections against things like stack overflow in PHP and infinite recursion. You can set this by setting the nesting level. It also provides a pretty formatted errors but not only is it pretty but it provides more information such as memory usage, time, function name and location on items in the call stack. It can also collect parameter information which shows the type with options to display the variable name (if possible) or values. It opts to minimal information to prevent crashing html displays with the browsers.

Another hot option is the ability to link to the files. The var_dump is overloaded to create a pretty, color-coded output. You can turn this off by setting the overload vardump option to 0.

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"Countinous Integration is about preventing your developers from burning in Integration Hell" - @s_bergmann

Integration Hell

My code is perfect, yours is pretty good and then Martin...well, he's a fucking idiot. (lost where he was going with this story). D=

Team member should integrate their work frequently. This reduces errors when managing multiple team members. The value (ROI) is in:

• reducing risk
• reduce repetitive processes
• generate deployable software
• enable better project visibility
• establish greater product confidence
• helps with late discovery of defects
  • regression testing
  • test coverage
• prevents low quality software
  • coding standard adherance
• prevents lack of deployable software

This practice focuses on software design that uses unit tests to prevent and detect defects. This all significantly works to provide significantly better quality software.

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@eliw starts off laying down his street cred. He'll be covering how to control the process of version control. As we've been going over the past week, use version control. The talk will be focusing on subversion as the technology but the talk will be dealing with the higher level concepts.
Basic Version Control Terminology

• commit/check-in
• branch
• tag
• trunk
• merge

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