4 posts tagged with "php"

While considering using Amazon SQS for a project recently, I was surprised at just how little SQS performance data was available on the Internet. In particular, while there's a bit of information available regarding throughput, there is very little information I can find regarding message latency.

Indeed, as long as SQS can scale horizontally, throughput is really not very important at all (within reason of course). But latency cannot usually be improved by scaling, so if latency is too high to be acceptable for any given project, then scaling is unlikely to ever change that.

As latency is so important for the project I had in mind, I decided to throw together a very small set of simple SQS benchmarking scripts to get an idea of what sort of latency (and throughput) we can expect from SQS.

Apache Qpid™ is a high performance open-source message queuing system. But there's no point me telling you all about it - just check it out over at http://qpid.apache.org/.

The Qpid project provides two different message brokers, and several client APIs. However it did not yet have a PHP client API, so I set about writing one :)

Although the PHP binding I created is SWIG-based, it was not as straight-forward as writing a simple SWIG interface file, and compiling... no sir! First off, running SWIG on the standard Qpid headers in PHP mode resulted in SWIG seg-faulting. So after reporting that bug to SWIG (it has since been fixed, yay!) and developing a workaround, I then had to solve a number of small issues, and then write some Qpid Variant ⇔ PHP type-mapping routines.

I've thought about creating my own Drupal theme for this site for sometime now, but haven't really found the time and motivation to get started. That is, until my friend Mike recently radically altered his blog by creating his own Drupal theme. Well, that inspired me to finally have a go at replacing this site's much-loved default "Garland" theme.

Well, after some initial head-scratching, I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how easy it can be to theme Drupal sites! My new theme, for example, is done entirely with three CSS files, and two images.

A couple of days ago, I was setting up the TinyMCE Drupal module on a friend's blog, and the blogger wanted quite a lot of the TinyMCE buttons enabled (who doesn't?). But the problem was that the TinyMCE Drupal module only supports up to 3 lines of buttons (while the TincyMCE editor itself has no such limitation), which meant that the last line of buttons was unnecessarily long, and caused all sorts of layout issues.