Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.
Facebook developer Haiping Zhao announces HipHop for PHP, a tool that translates PHP to C++ and compiles it using g++.
I hinted at this in my link post, but I thought I’d write up the whole thing in hopes of discussing it. I have a page that will include a Google Map with markers for a number of locations (potentially a large number of markers). For an explanation of how to add markers to a Google Map, check out this page.
So the question is: how do you get the address data from my database to Google Maps?
The process is to geocode the address and then apply the marker to the map. There’s a simple example at that link.
Here are some possible approaches:
I’ve done some searching to find out how people handle this problem, but haven’t seen any good answers yet. Any ideas?
Giant Robots asks the question, Why Do Rubyists Test So Completely? It’s a good question. Developers on other platforms would benefit greatly from the culture of testing that has been established among Rubyists (and especially Rails developers). They have their own list, and I agree with all of the items on it. I have one reason that I’m surprised they didn’t list.
Rails makes it really easy to start testing. When you generate a new Rails application, it gives you a place to put your tests. When you generate controllers and models, it creates skeletal tests for them. Nobody has to sit and wonder, “What should I be testing.” The framework tells you. So the next step is just to fill in the blanks. Then when you want to run your tests, you just type “rake” in your application directory.
Java has JUnit and all of the IDEs have test runners, but beyond that, you’re on your own. What do you test? How do you organize your tests into suites? How do you run the suites? These are all questions you have to answer before you build a testing regime. Individual unit tests are easy to write, but getting it together to really make a habit of testing is a lot more work than it is with Rails.
And in the PHP world, things are even worse. I have never seen a PHP application with a robust unit test suite, although I’m sure they exist.
The Rails approach makes the biggest difference with people who aren’t already committed to unit testing. If you know the value of testing, you’ll jump through the hoops to set up tests, even if it’s a pain. If you’re not yet convinced, then the extra work required to set up unit testing with other platforms prevents people from getting started. It’s very much the deliberate choices the creators of Rails made to encourage and facilitate testing that explain in large part why testing is such a part of the culture.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been looking at PHP frameworks for a project. I’ve dug into the PHP MVC world any number of times, and have even used a couple of these frameworks before, but I’ve never been really satisfied with any of them. I’d make a table comparing them, or something, but that’s not really how I work.
Generally, the way I evaluate software is that I just pick something and start using it until I run into a problem that I am not willing to accept or work around, then I move on to something else. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a single project, and sometimes it takes years, but the methodology never changes.
Here’s how it went.
This time around, I started with the Zend Framework. Why? It’s made by the people who work on PHP itself, so I assumed it would be the most idiomatically sound framework for PHP applications. In other words, applications written using Zend would make sense in the context of PHP expertise.
I downloaded it, set it up on my computer, and got started. The setup was easy enough, and the configuration process seemed reasonable. Then I started going through the Quick Start guide, working through the example application. I got to the section on creating a model. When I started really looking at how Zend models work, I decided that the framework requires too much typing, and moved on to other things.
CodeIgniter is a much simpler framework created by EllisLabs. I’ve used it on two other projects, and was vaguely dissatisfied with it, but decided to give it another shot, because I really do appreciate its strengths. My main gripe in the past has been that CodeIgniter models are really DAOs and I’ve been spoiled by Hibernate and ActiveRecord. What’s particularly frustrating is that the documentation is written by someone who doesn’t understand the difference between the DAO pattern and real object-relational modeling, so it’s easy to get the wrong impression of the capabilities of the framework.
CodeIgniter is trivial to set up, and I got as far as creating a new application and implementing some test functionality. The first (minor) disappointment was the fact that CodeIgniter has no built in support for layouts. Fortunately I was able to find a simple workaround on the forums that works quite well.
Then I learned about CodeIgniter’s philosophical stance against the query string. I knew I was in trouble when I read the following in the documentation for the Input library:
Destroys the global GET array. Since CodeIgniter does not utilize GET strings, there is no reason to allow it.
Let me just say, CodeIgniter may not use the GET array, but my application certainly will. Let’s say I’m writing a report that takes parameters like sort_field and sort_order and timeframe. The most sensible way to approach the problem is to include name-value pairs in the URL. Using POST is not an option for reasons of bookmarking alone.
Eliminating the use of parameters in the query string completely is just an awful thing for a framework to do. Given that this is blindingly obvious, lots of people have asked about it on the CodeIgniter forum. There are workarounds that require modifying the core CodeIgniter code (no thanks), but the official word is not good:
It can be fairly polarizing in the forums here, and there are plenty of existing topics to read through, so I’m going to decline to say anything other than it’s the way the framework is designed. CI wants you to use URL segments and have clean, query string free URLs. I understand if that’s not an answer that satisfies you, but I do encourage you to read through the many existing topics on the subject—the workarounds are not very severe nor hard to keep up with across updates. If it’s a feature that’s very important to you and you want to use CI to build your application, you would either need to modify CI (which is one of the great things about open source frameworks) or be willing to work around it with an external solution.
I moved on.
At this point I felt a little stuck, as I thought I was down to PHP ports of Rails. I love Ruby on Rails, but Ruby and PHP are very different languages, and the thought of PHP on Rails brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s most famous quotation:
“Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I dismissed CakePHP out of hand, based on minimal involvement in an unpleasant project that used it and lots of complaints about it that I’ve heard second hand. I thought about it for a second, but quickly decided against it.
My next thought was to try out Symfony. I had just started digging into some really scary looking documentation when I received a recommendation for …
Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter that keeps all the stuff I like and gets rid of some of the dumb stuff (like the GET method problem). It was easy to set up and easy to get started with, so I’m trying to figure out exactly which parts are the good parts and use those. We’ll see how long the relationship lasts.
I didn’t know until just now that you don’t need to include the closing ?> in PHP files that consist entirely of code. The Drupal coding standards explain why you probably want to leave it out:
Note that the final
?>should be omitted from all code files–modules, includes, etc. The closing delimiter is optional, and removing it helps prevent unwanted white space at the end of files which can cause problems elsewhere in the system.
The most common problem it prevents is the “headers already sent” error that crops up when errant line feeds are included at the end of code files.
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