Apache ZooKeeper is the coolest technology I recently came across. I found it when I was doing a research about Solr Cloud features. I got very impressed by Solr’s distributed computing. You literately have to fire a new instance and it will automatically find its place in “the cloud”. It will assign itself to a particular shards and it will make a decision to become a leader or a replica. Later you can query any of the available servers and it will find you all required data even if it’s not on that server. If some of the servers fail the service will continue to work. Very dynamic, very clever, very cool.
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Apache2 vs Nginx for PHP application
Time is money. This somewhat shallow and overused saying fits perfectly well into any on-line business. Users are impatient and every millisecond brings them closer to leaving your website.
If you’ve ever been trying to squeeze more out of hardware you must have come across Nginx (engine x). Nginx usually appears in context of PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) and APC (Alternative PHP Cache). This setup is often pitched to be the ultimate combo for a web server but what that really means? How much faster a PHP application is going to be on a different web server? I had to check it and the answer as often is – that depends.
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Introduction to Test Driven Development
Yesterday I had a great pleasure to speak at Green Room about Test Driven Development. This was my first speech ever and despite the stress it was fun doing it. A warm thanks to all participants for joining us that evening and to UVD and Browser London for organising the event. I hope you’re going to like the video.
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Beginners guide to Amazon Cloud
Everybody heard about Amazon Cloud. It has been around for a good few years. Despite its popularity not everybody had a chance to try it. Amazon tries it best to get more people on board by offering “Micro” versions of their web service for free. If you are into technology or just want a quality hosting for your website, it’s worth getting familiar with AWS. After all.. can you beat free?
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Faker – The ultimate Lorem Ipsum for PHP
From time to time we all have to work with data which doesn’t exist. The best example is web development. Front-end developers create HTML and CSS before any web content is created. The common practice is to use Lorem Impsum which proved to be effective strategy. It’s not much different with back-end programming. We need dummy data at least as often as front-end devs. The most popular cases are:
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Integrate PHP application with Solr search engine
So why do you need a search engine, is database not enough? If you create a small website it might not matter. With medium or big size applications it’s often wiser to go for a search engine. Saying that, even a small websites can benefit from Solr if you desire a high level of relevance in search results.
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Boost WordPress performance with Varnish Cache
Lets face it, WordPress is slow. With every request it has to go though thousands lines of code and multiple SQL queries to render a page. Very popular configuration for a WordPress site is Apache, mod_rewrite, mod_php, PHP and MySQL. It’s very good setup but can’t be consider the fastest (at least without any additional tweaking).
The good news is WordPress doesn’t have to be a speed demon. In most cases it’s just a CMS to produce static pages. If the content is static it doesn’t make any sense to waste CPU cycles on re-rendering the same HTML over and over again.
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