Ze’ev Suraski began by giving a brief technical history of the PHP language. PHP 1 and 2 were developed around 1995. PHP 3, which started using lex/yacc more efficiently, was released in June 1998, execute while parsing. PHP 4 (May 2000) greatly improved performance (swtiched to a “compile first/execute later” paradigm, added reference counting) and […]
Month: November 2002
ApacheCon: Wednesday Afternoon
Lunch Sander, Jade, Zak, Shane and I headed off to the Mirage for their buffet lunch. Coversation included dead end jobs at dental labs, LindowsOS, differences between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, the conference scene, and handling traffic surges on websites (Fifa World Cup, 9/11, slashdot). After lunch, I had a drink with Randy Terbush. We […]
ApacheCon: Sun and Open Source
John Fowler, Sun’s Software CTO, spoke about Sun’s commitment to the Open Source movement. Nothing earth-shattering. Usual corporate pitch about how we love the O-S movement, and look how much wonderful stuff we’ve opened up. Java Community Process 2.5 sounds kinda interesting. What was more interesting was what Fowler didn’t say. I didn’t hear the […]
ApacheCon: Struts for MVC Web Apps
According to Craig McClanahan, writing a web application is more difficult than writing a traditional application for a couple of pretty simple reasons: HTTP is a stateless protocol, and applications need to maintain state Since the web is world-wide, applications are expected to be internationalized To complicate matters more, building any large scale application requires […]
ApacheCon: Audio and Apache
Sander van Zoest, formerly of MP3.com, gave a great introduction to serving audio via Apache and other servers. van Zoest described several different ways to deliver audio: HTTP downloading, HTTP streaming, Real Time Streaming Protocol (both on-demand streaming and live broadcast) and Windows Media Player’s MMS protocol. Since audio players seem to have pretty dumb […]
Dinner with Uncle Steve
My uncle Steve is in Las Vegas for Comdex, so we met up for dinner. He lives in Chicago so we don’t get to see him too often. Tonight was a real treat. We enjoyed some pretty decent sushi at the San Remo hotel. Afterwards, we headed downtown to see the light show at the […]
ApacheCon: Scalable Internet Architectures 2
High Availability and Load Balancing Theo challenged the audience to recognize the difference between replicateable data and non-replicateable data. Again the theme of the right tool for the job came up. Replicateable data needs marginal protection so you can use commodity hardware. Non-replicateable data needs single-point reliability, so you should consider “Enterprise” hardware. He then […]
ApacheCon: Scalable Internet Architectures 1
Theo and George Schlossnagle gave a 2 hour talk on a hodge-podge of a few topics for scaling large websites. I’ll split this into two blogs. Low-hanging fruit: Apache 1.3 optimizations First, George pointed out one of the easiest tricks to optimize a large website: turn KeepAlive Off. No surprise here; Yahoo! has been doing […]
ApacheCon: Waka: a replacement for HTTP
Ok, I was a little misguided when I wrote earlier that XML/I18N was off-topic for an Apache conference. While not about the Apache server itself, these technologies are in fact widely used in today’s environment of HTTP and Apache. But how about something completely different: a brand new protocol to replace HTTP? Whoa. (This is […]
ApacheCon: XML and I18N
After lunch, I headed off to see a slightly-off-topic presentation on XML and Internationalization by Yahoo!’s own Sander van Zoest. van Zoest began discussing Unicode overall, covered the UTF variants such as UTF-8, and BOM (Byte Order Marks). Moving into XML itself, he gave an overview of the intended use of the xml:lang tag and […]