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Incase you're not familiar with the advantages of message queues in web applications, they allow you to (among other things) offload tasks and processes that may be initiated by users interacting with your application but the results of which need not return back to the user synchronously. E.g. a user submits an e-commerce order, the application captures the order and returns a confirmation to the user. As an ...

You should've heard of Mash by now, if not, get out of your cubbyhole and check out the latest social network offering from Yahoo! The social network aspect isn't new, but what is new is the fluid free-for-all profile mashing. Mash lets you change your friends' profiles - whether its content styling changes or adding modules. Luckily, for those who are paranoid about having their precious profiles tampered with, ...

The Joel Spolsky keynote was one of the most engaging, interesting and downright hilarious presentations I've heard this year. He really knows how to talk to the crowd. A few suggestions from Joel on creating great software: Make people happy Think about emotions Obsess over aesthetics Joel is right - developers don't necessarily want to think about beautifying their applications. Developers largely work on the middle-tier and supporting backends, and like everyone, ...

Second day here at the ZendCon 07, and no session better than Eli White's PHP Features You Didn't Know Existed to start off the day. PHP developers who've been coding for a number of years (some 10 years or more) were scoffing at the idea that Eli would present anything new or 'undiscovered'. But there wasn't a cough in the packed room as Eli presented rarely-used hidden gems ...

The first day of Zend Con was pretty interesting. I wasn't able to attend all the sessions, but the notable ones were Terry Chay's The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture (hilarious guy), Ben Ramsey's Give Your Site A Boost With memcache, and Eli White's High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques (standing room only). These types of sessions make conferences interesting and a learning ...

Now this is clever. Using a simple concept of checking the color of links and on the assumption that visited links are a different color than unvisited ones, you can find out all the URLs in your client's browser history. Now that's not invasion of privacy...its just a clever hack ;) Read all about Spyjax. Thanks Pedro!

In this series, we take a look at how to reduce load times across your site. The first part of the series tackles one of the most important techniques which usually proves to drastically reduce your load times. Usually it's not enough to use HTTP Compression alone (best results when coupled with smart caching), but I've seen anywhere between 40%-80% speed increases.

Given my recent obsession with optimizing website load times recently, I felt the need to share my research findings. There are more ways than flavors at a gellato store, but fear not, I'll try to condense them into a consumable chunk in the next few series of posts. Here's a rough breakdown of what I intend to explore: HTTP Compression Application level caching (PHP) Client side requests optimization Non-vital scripts optimization Client side caching ...

I finally got tired of getting timed out of my server while using Terminal and/or iTerm. Luckily, the fix was easier and less complicated than I imagined. It was a system-wide ssh config fix. Try the following: 1. sudo emacs /etc/ssh_config 2. add a new line "ServerAliveInterval 60" 3. save and exit That should do it. The next time you ssh (using either Terminal or iTerm), you'll be sending 'Keep Alive' packets ...