Thanks to everyone who came to my presentation today at the Lone Star PHP conference.

Here is my presentation in PDF form.

Anecdotal Development and Deployment

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Brian

Posted by Brian Blood as General, MySQL, php, Servers, Web App Development at 2:53 PM UTC

No Comments »

Please come to the LoneStar PHP conference on June 11 where I will be giving a talk about setups/workflows for development and deployment of PHP based web sites/applications.

Where Crowne Plaza Suites – Coit/635
When: Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 8:00am – 5:30pm
How: A bargain at $60 and lunch is provided.

Posted by Brian Blood as php, Servers, Soap Box, Web App Development at 11:39 AM UTC

No Comments »

When setting up webservers for clients, I’ll usually configure and secure an installation of phpMyAdmin to allow them easy access to the MySQL database server.

I would also want to make sure it was easy to update that installation to the latest stable version. In the past this was easily done by initially checking out the STABLE tag from their Subversion repository using the following style command:

svn co https://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/phpmyadmin/tags/STABLE/phpMyAdmin

and then when I wanted to update, it was a simple matter of running:

svn update

Well, the phpMyAdmin folks switched over to using git as their SCM system and unfortunately, they didn’t post any instructions on how a web server administrator who was never going to be changing/committing code back into the system would perform the same action using git. It took me about an hour of searching, reading, digesting how git works, cursing, but I finally came up with the following set of git commands necessary to checkout the STABLE branch of phpMyAdmin:

git clone --depth=1 git://phpmyadmin.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
cd phpmyadmin
git checkout --track -b PMASTABLE  origin/STABLE

…what that means is: clone the main repository from the specified path, drop into the newly created repository directory and thirdly create a new branch in the local repository called PMASTABLE that will track the remote repository’s branch called “origin/STABLE”.

The “depth=1″ parameter tells git not to copy a huge set of changes, but only the most recent set.

So, from here on, I should be able to merely run: “git pull” on that repository and it should update it to the latest STABLE.

Hopefully, others will find this useful.

Posted by Brian Blood as Database, MySQL, php, Servers, Web App Development, Web Software at 9:24 PM UTC

5 Comments »

If you will be in the DFW area at the end of July, please come see the talk I will be giving at the 3rd session of the PHP track on  Building Scalable PHP Web Applications.

The conference will be at the University of Texas at Dallas on July 30.

http://dallastechfest.com/Tracks/PHP/tabid/74/Default.aspx

Brian

Posted by Brian Blood as php, Servers, Soap Box, Web App Development at 4:21 PM UTC

No Comments »

I gave a presentation to the Dallas PHP user group on May 11, 2010 on Creating Scalable PHP Web Applications.

Download the presentation in PDF.

Here is a basic outline:

• Introduction
  • Traditional Single Server and Dedicated DB-2 Server data flows.
  • What does it mean to be Scalable, Available and Redundant?
• Planning your Delivery Architecture.
  • Delivery Resource Types – html/image/pdf/email/rss
  • URL types and origins for main text/html, static images, user generated media
• Delivery Architecture Components
  • Web Servers
  • Database Systems
  • Load Balancers
  • Caching systems
  • PHP Application Code
• Web Server systems
  • Make fast and agile and identical
  • Key concept: Web systems must be thought of as being Disposable.
  • Storage of source and non-source delivery resources
  • Deployment of web servers – OS/PHP Load, Code Deployment/Updates
• Database systems
  • Hardest to Scale, throw money at this problem
  • Replication and caching layers can extend life/performance of primary database.
  • Make a plan to deal with Primary Failure – what in site will/won’t work.
  • Make a plan to deal with Primary Recovery
  • TEST THAT PLAN
  • Redundant MySQL Overview
  • Caching Layers Overview
• Load Balancers
  • Hardware/Software List
  • Primary Features
  • Secondary Features
  • Example Service/Content rule Pseudo-Config
• PHP Component Code changes
  • Sessions
    • Custom Session Data Handler
    • Basics and Gotchas
    • Example Session SQL Table
  • Non-Source File & Data Storage
    • Uploaded images/documents (avatars/photos)
    • System generated files (chart images for emails)
    • System Generated Data (calculated results data)
    • Data pulled from external system (RSS feed cache)
    • Store into shared system accessible by all front-ends
    • Admin system for forced pushes/cleanouts. Monitoring.
  • Resource Delivery
  • • Simple and complex examples.
    • Code for abstracting URL generation – App::URL(‘logo.jpg’, ‘branded’)
    • Example of complex URL structures.
    • Delivery issues with CSS and JavaScript
    • Serving SSL protected content with references to external static media; needs SSL too!
    • Using ErrorDocument to create a Just-In-Time delivery system to media servers.
  • Periodic Process Execution
    • Using Queues and Semaphores to control execution.

Posted by Brian Blood as Content Networking, Database, Hardware, MySQL, php, Servers, Web App Development at 11:47 PM UTC

No Comments »