Professional PHP Development Blog

Following up on my last post about Mosso / The Rackspace Cloud, I thought it might be best to mention a few of the other competing services currently on the scene.

Although they all have different feature sets and capabilities, they all share the common element of being “cloud” in nature, in that they all have at least some ability to scale over multiple machines, to grow or shrink available server resources dynamically (or, at least, somewhat easily), and are web-based.

One of the biggest companies meeting these qualifications is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

It is, as the name implies, offered by Amazon, and is one of the services offered by their AWS “suite” of products.

In their words…

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Although they are a bit different than web hosting companies such as Mosso, there are a lot of applications that require just what they are providing, so I thought it best to mention them here.

It can also integrate easily with some of Amazon’s other services, such as their Storage service.

Another competing service is GoGrid (this one is still in Beta). While I have no personal experience with GoGrid, they look like they might be a decent service.

Yes, I know I should say something a little more profound on GoGrid. Perhaps I should sign up for an account with them for a month or two to try their service out.

3tera is another popular service. It appears that they also offer cPanel capabilities on some of their plans, something which I have often heard as a complaint against Mosso. Personally, the Mosso control panel works fine for me, but since cPanel has such a large market share, many developers often feel more comfortable using it.

Haven’t found one yet that you like? Try ElasticHosts. Based in the UK, this might be best for those with a primarily European audience, although it can certainly work just fine for sites based in the USA (or elsewhere) as well.

Finally, we come to MediaTemple, which probably comes the closest to Mosso from any of the hosting companies we’ve reviewed so far.

Personally, I have seen three websites so far hosted with them that at least partially crashed when their traffic suddenly increased dramatically.

That being said, however, this is relatively new technology, so some glitches from time to time are to be expected, and as it has been a while, perhaps they have worked out those issues by now.

Also, starting at $20/month, their hosting plans are a bit less expensive than, say, Mosso, which starts at $100/month (they both increase as you increase server usage).

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

Although according to Wikipedia, they weren’t launched until February 19, 2008, I first heard about Mosso, a cloud computing (cloud hosting) service from a friend nearly two years ago.

At the time, I was working on a big web programming project, and despite the fact that it was on a dedicated server by itself, it was still slowing the site down quite a bit because of the sheer size of the project (the number of hits/second, the size of the database, the number of database queries, etc.).

Although I ended up not using it on that project due to the fact that I needed custom software installed on the server for this project, and they weren’t supporting it, the idea behind their hosting service intrigued me.

Since then, I have used their service for multiple projects, and have always been pleased with their reliability, scalability, and support.

The concept behind their service is relatively simple:

Instead of having one website on one server (and often having hundreds of websites on a single server), have a big “network”/cloud of interconnected web hosting servers, and have all websites hosted by that “cloud” of servers.

The benefits are many, but for most users, the primary selling points are:

1. The uptime, as well as data security, is a lot higher. This is because under a usual hosting setup, if the server goes down (has a hard drive failure, or some other issue), all websites on that server instantly go offline (and under some circumstances, data can be lost as well).

With a cloud setup, everything is redundant, so if one server goes down, the other servers automatically “take up the slack”, and there is zero downtime (theoretically, at least).

2. It is a lot more scalable. If you had a website on a usual hosting setup and you suddenly got a surge of traffic to your site, your server may or may not be able to handle the increased load.

Under a cloud setup, instead of being limited to the resources of one single server, you are limited to the resources of the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers on the “network”, so theoretically, your site traffic could increase 100 times overnight, and your site would load just as fast as it would otherwise.

These two features in particular have suited themselves very well for several projects I have worked on that either have a large traffic potential (and need access to a huge amount of server resources), or where reliability, uptime, and data security are critical.

While they certainly have their little issues with occasional downtime, these issues are to be expected with technology like this that is relatively new to the scene, and for my projects, this hasn’t posed an issue so far.

Mosso, which is currently in the process of rebranding themselves as “The Rackspace Cloud”, is, as the name implies, a “division” of Rackspace, which is known for their “fanatical support”.

As cloud computing seems to be the future of web hosting, the move toward cloud hosting and tighter integration with Mosso on the part of Rackspace seems to be a very business-savvy move, as more and more developers look to upgrade their hosting from the standard shared server setup.

The only big downside to small websites looking to create their own account with Mosso is that their least expensive fee runs at $100/month, and increases from there based on the server resources used.

However, for larger websites where scalability and reliability is important, it might be worth taking a look at.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

During the course of the past few months, I have been working on and off on several projects based on the relatively new Kohana PHP Framework.

Although this framework is relatively new, it is based off a well-established PHP framework, CodeIgniter, which I have used extensively, as well as highly recommend.

Kohana, which bills itself as “a PHP 5 framework that uses the Model View Controller architectural pattern. It aims to be secure, lightweight, and easy to use.”, delivers on these claims, in my opinion.

The MVC (Model View Controller) is, in my opinion, the best solution out there for development of most web applications, as it allows developers to write “beautiful”, clean code, allows for separation of the different parts of the code to allow, for example, switching of themes (views) without any changes to the layer that interfaces with the database (model), and allows a great deal of flexibility depending on the different programming styles different developers have.

It also allows for the easy use of most popular code libraries.

For example, I routinely use the Smarty template library in both CodeIgniter and Kohana projects, as well as a wide range of other libraries for authentication, data manipulation, email management, and a wide range of other tasks.

Kohana makes it easy to use libraries that also work seamlessly with other major PHP frameworks, such as the Zend framework or CakePHP.

Since it is coming from the popular CodeIgniter framework, it is based on well-developed code that has withstood the test of multiple projects.  CodeIgniter, in the interest of maintaining support for older versions, is limited in the extent to which it can make a clean break with older technology and programming styles.

Kohana, as a form of spin-off, had an opportunity to discard those features that might hinder development of this framework in the future, as well as build a solid foundation based on the solid infrastructure that CodeIgniter had developed over the years.

One of the main differences is the fact that Kohana is built from the ground up with strict PHP 5 OOP design, which offers “visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons”, among other benefits.

PHP 5 has been on the scene for many years now, but due to requirements for backward support, many web hosts, PHP frameworks, and developers still support and use PHP 4 extensively.

While PHP 4 is a fine version of the language to use, with development of PHP 6 well under way, it seems a wise option to start phasing out support for PHP 4, in order to take advantage of the many features and benefits that the more recent versions of PHP have to offer.

Kohana also prides itself in being a very lightweight framework solution.  This is actually one of the initial reasons why I was attracted to CodeIgniter early on, as they are both lighter, faster frameworks, compared with other similar frameworks currently on the scene.

While they certainly can be set up to support large, bulky libraries where necessary, the default Kohana installation is relatively lightweight, flexible, and very easy to work with.

The fact that it is a relatively new library also means that the user base, as well as the support for the framework isn’t quite up to the level of CodeIgniter or other major frameworks.

However, for those of us who enjoy working with “new” technology and don’t mind spending some extra time debugging, this is a framework to keep in mind for future projects.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

A couple minutes ago, I discovered a privacy flaw on a major website.

I signed up to the Presidential Inaugural Committee opt-in form, which then redirected me to another page where they were asking for donations, with my name, email address, and zip code pre-filled.

There was nothing too unusual about that, except the URL to the page was in this format:

https://donate.pic2009.org/page/contribute/firsttoknow?stg_signup_id=xxx (where “xxx” was a number, such as “12345″).

I got curious, and decided to try the number one lower then mine as the “stg_signup_id”, and, sure enough, the form popped up, pre-populated with another persons name, zip code, and email address.

This privacy vulnerability could have been eliminated by better planning, such as putting the information in a cookie on the browser, or something like that, rather then letting them access the data directly from the database with no checking to ensure that they were the same person.

You would think that a site with that kind of exposure would have at least some basic security standards for the data from their visitors, but I suppose not.

Unfortunately, I have found that this is not necessarily all that unusual, even with major websites.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

As my readers are probably aware, I am definitely a programmer first, and a graphic designer second (or perhaps third or fourth).

However, in working on clients websites, I often find myself needing to pull up Photoshop or Fireworks (my tools of choice) and do some work on graphics, or perhaps spend an hour or two on a CSS file getting formatting adjusted.

Because of that, I was interested in a post by Elite by Design I found in my RSS reader this morning with links to 22 different free icon packs.

I’m always looking for shortcuts in web site development (clients generally like to see work done both fast and well), and using different free libraries such as the jQuery Javascript library or these icon packs are a very efficient way to cut development time, while actually increasing the quality of the end product.

Anyway, check them out!

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

Rule #1 of having a freelance programming business (well, maybe not #1, but fairly high up there):

“Ensure that the domain registration on your blog/email host doesn’t expire.”

I had this domain set to not automatically renew, and unfortunately, it expired earlier this month, and it took me a few days to figure out why all of the potential clients/clients I had been emailing suddenly stopped replying to my emails.

My apologies to everyone for that glitch on my part.

I do, however, now have some time available to take on new work, so if you have a project you would like me to handle for you, please shoot me a message.

Thanks!

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

As many of you know, WordPress is by far my favorite blogging platform (and the one that I use for this blog).

Three days ago, Wordpress 2.6.5 was released, and according to the post on WordPress.org, it contains one security fix and three bug fixes.

From their site:

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

You can download the latest package from WordPress.org/Download.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

After trying out MyIntervals for a while, I think I am going back to Basecamp for my project management solution.

Why?

I really liked the time tracking/time management that MyIntervals offered, but there are several areas where I feel it didn’t meet my needs as well as Basecamp did.

While MyIntervals might be a terrific solution for some web developers, it has some features I didn’t need that only added to the complexity, and it was a lot weaker in terms of communication between me and my clients, an area that Basecamp is particularly strong in.

I’m going to really miss some of the time management functionality that MyIntervals provided, but there are a few add-ons to Basecamp that I believe will help close the gap in that area between the two solutions. In particular, Project Recon is one that I will definitely be trying out. I might also try some of the other solutions listed here in the near future, as they have several interesting ones listed there.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

About a week ago, I got an email stating that Sphinx version 0.9.8 had been released.

I first used Sphinx well over a year ago, when I had a project that required full-text searching of a massive, 25 Million + database, something that was probably a little too big for the default MySQL full-text engine to handle. Additionally, I wanted to use the InnoDB MySQL engine, as opposed to the ISAM (which is the one that had full-text capabilities).

After doing some research, I ended up going with a MySQL/Sphinx joint solution, where I stored the data in MySQL, and used Sphinx to actually do the searching.

Since then, this already impressive project has come a long way, and if you haven’t already checked it out, it is well worth a look. It seems to be gaining quite a bit of traction. From the latest email:

Also in the news, we’re among the finalists in SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2008! Sphinx is in the shortlists for “Best Project”, “Best Project for the Enterprise”, and, somewhat unexpectedly for me, “Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition”. Many thanks to all who voted for Sphinx during the nominations! Now is the time to vote again in the 2nd round. There are several quite popular competitors (such as OpenOffice), so please spread the word as much as you can.

Here’s the link again…

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!

Project management software! If you aren’t using it now, you’re likely not being as productive as you otherwise might be.

I have, in the past, used Basecamp to manage my projects (in conjunction with Blinksale). Recently, however, I have been wanting something a little different, so after eying it for a few weeks, I finally set up a trial account with MyIntervals this morning (both software packages offer a free trial).

Pros? Cons?

Well, they each have their strengths, I suppose.

Basecamp is stronger on the communication side of things (with “Writeboards”, Messages, and even chat software integrated). They also pride themselves on the simplicity of their software, and in my experience, clients rarely have any trouble learning how it works. It doesn’t have any invoicing functionality, but I have made up for that deficiency by integrating it with Blinksale.

MyIntervals, on the other hand, is stronger on time management. It has detailed time tracking and reporting interfaces, as well as invoicing functionality, and has a good many more features then Basecamp has.

It’s just been one day, but so far, I am really liking MyIntervals, and their emphasis on time management/tracking, so I will most likely be staying with them.

P.S. I am currently able to accept a limited number of additional clients for my PHP Development services. Interested in discussing the possibility of my handling your project for you? Contact me!