Sam’s random musings

Donut Czar : CakePHP 1.2 Helper Function Examples: Nice examples for Time, Number, Html, Form

Implementing efficient counters with MySQL:

On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object - blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view.

The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way - they convert read load to write load. When you would simply fetch given object information now you do not only fetch the data but also update the view counter.

Some good tips for a big performance and scaling tweek for your tables

(Via Planet MySQL.)

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language:

fullduplex.org » How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who [...]

Oh man so true so true

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide:

It’s so regular you could set your watch by it. The decay of a community is just as predictable as the decay of certain stable nuclear isotopes. As soon as an open source project, language, or what-have-you achieves a certain notoriety%u2014its half-life, if you will%u2014they swarm in, seemingly draining the very life out of the community itself. They are the Help Vampires. And I’m here to stop them.

SO RIGHT ON IT HURTS

cakemac:

cakemac is a project by James Coletti with the goal to provide a pre-configured package with everything you need to build cake applications (i.e. Apache, MySQL, PHP, and CakePHP) on a mac. If you are a mac user this project may be interesting for you.

This could be nice clean way for people to get set up, wonder if he might want a cocoa front end to bake… been thinking of playing with making one…

(Via cakebaker.)

DevShed: Debugging and Performance:

In another part of their series of excerpts from the Zend PHP Certification Guide (from Zend), DevShed has posted this article talking about debugging and performance issues and methods.

In this article they look at things like flattening if statements, spplitting single commands across multiple lines, and the difference between =, ==, and ===.

Worth reading, some good tips and things to keep in mind.

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

HiveMind on PHP and Java:

Our buddies over at hivemind.co.uk have published another PHP article. This time, instead of decrying PHP, they show how to use the PHP-Java bridge. The article itself, titled How to Bridge PHP and Java for Powerful Web Solutions it technically solid for the most part. I wonder about the advice on creating an autoexec.bat file to set your PATH and Java’s CLASSPATH but it is technically accurate, you can do it this way.

Beyond that, there is a good primer for getting the JDK setup and operating on your machine in a minimum number of steps. (and since it’s Windows based, it’s important to know that no reboots are required for this installation.) Once you have the JDK installed, they walk you through a quick “hello world” of creating a Java class and using it in PHP.

Seems prety simple and if you have existing Java code it is cool to leverage that, I wonder how this relates to the java bridge in Zend Plateform.

(Via Zend Developer Zone.)

Design Review Tips:

(Via Bug Bash.)