Splebly

On the ZendCasts site today there’s a new video looking at the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework and how it can be used to speed up the response time for things like calls to a web service.

This is part 4 in a four part series on Google Docs and Google maps. While this example shows how to cache a Class to a file, you could easily modify the code to work with other caching backends such as a memory-based caching engine or something like Zend Optimizer or APC.

If you want to get caught up on the series, here’s the links to part one, two and three.

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now:  Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now:  Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now:  Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now:  40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

Then: The Prince
Now:  The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)

smile

Facebook has announced
the release of its Tornado web server under the Apache license.
“Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework
written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous
connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core
piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality,
which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing
Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on
speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.” The code
can be had from tornadoweb.org.

During my career as a consultant and web developer I’ve worked on a number of “software as a service” (SaaS) web applications. Such web applications are designed to be used
by multiple customers, where each customer is typically a company that has dozens or hundreds of users (its employees or customers) that access the system. One such SaaS-style
application that I’ve worked on for the past several years is a hosted application used by hospitals and clinics to manage patient information, doctor’s appointments,
billing, prescriptions, and so forth.

When developing a SaaS-style application you need to decide how to store each customer’s data. The article Multi-Tenant
Data Architecture examines different data architectures for SaaS applications. One option presented in the article is to store all customer data in a single database.
This approach requires adding a CustomerID column to all of your tables to determine which data belongs to what customer. Moreover, whenever you query the
database to display data in a web page you need to make sure to filter the data by the CustomerID of the currently logged on user. Another option is to use a
separate database for each customer. This approach lessens the risk of a user somehow seeing or modifying data for a different customer and this level of isolation may be
necessary for applications that store sensitive data, such as health care and financial applications. The hospital software SaaS application I work on uses such a separate
database data architecture.

One downside to using separate databases is that it is harder to run a query against all customer data. For example, if you find an anomaly in the data for one customer – say,
a patient record that has a street address specified but no city specified – it can be difficult to quickly determine whether the same anomaly exists in other databases. This
article discusses different ways to query multiple databases and shows a simple, web-based tool I’ve created and routinely use for those SaaS-style web applications I work
on that use separate databases to store different customer data. Read on to learn more!

Read More >

Read More……(read more)

via http://sfist.com/2008/12/19/judge_sismisses_walgreens_whine_ove.php

Sudheer Satyanarayana has this new post on his blog today talking about a simple way (via a PEAR package) to make an XML-RPC connection to ping technorati about updates to your blog.

In a previous blog post we discussed how to consume the Technorati ping web service using XML-RPC. The PEAR package XML_RPC2 provides convenient client and server objects. You can call the remote methods as if they were the methods of the client object. In this post, let us accomplish the same using a PEAR package XML_RPC2. We will write a client script to update Technorati when there is new post in your blog site.

You’ll need to grab the XML_RPC2 PEAR package to make this all work, but once that’s installed, you’re a quick few lines of code away from a client to update Technorati with the ping information for your site.

It seems my posts lately are always in relation to solving a problem or answering a question for someone else. If you're looking for a way to display categories in the sidebar, change category display, or create a category menu then …

Clayton M…

A friend asked me to help out import some products and categories from an old database to a brand new magento install. What I first did was to construct a CSV file with all the categories from the old store (that was the easy part. …

My Science Is …