Zend Framework « Bill Shupp

1Jun/110

PHP’s interactive shell as your application console

When developing a web application, it's common for your feature development to be ahead of any data administration tools you might need. While some frameworks, such as django, have built in admin tools for managing your application's data, many don't. At my current job we use Zend Framework, and have rolled our own lightweight model layer which does not have any fancy automatic admin tools. In addition to supporting database pools and selectors for partitioning of data, it also has transparent caching of data. While this is good for speed, it precludes you from making any data storage changes without going through this model layer or the cache will get out of sync. For now, rather than doing any DB queries directly, we do them through CLI jobs built for a specific task (batch updates, etc). This works fairly well, but often things come up that aren't yet supported in the application's admin tools, such as changing a user's status bits, etc.. Things that a CLI console would be useful for.

Filed under: PHP, Technology, Zend Framework Continue reading

7May/110

Getting started with Kestrel from a PHP application

We've been using Twitter's kestrel queue server for a while now at work, but only from our service layer, which is written in python. Now that we have some queueing needs from our application layer, written in PHP, I spent a few days this week adding queue support to our web application. I thought I'd share what I learned, and how I implemented it.

Goals

The kestrel server itself was pretty straightforward to get up and running. The only thing I would point out is that I recommend sticking to release branches, as master was fairly unstable when I tried to use it. Regarding implementing the client, there were a few goals I had in mind when I started:

Since kestrel is built on the memcache protocol, try and leverage an existing memcache client rather than build one from scratch
Utilize our existing batch job infrastructure, which I covered previously here, and make sure our multi-tenant needs are met
Keep the queue interface generic in case we change queue servers later
Utilize existing kestrel management tools, only build out the the functionality we need

With these goals in mind, I ended up with 4 components: a kestrel client, a producer, a consumer, and a very small CLI harness for running the consumer. But before I even coded anything, I set up kestrel web, a web UI for kestrel written by my co-worker Matt Erkkila. Kestrel web allows you to view statistics on kestrel, manage queues, as well as sort and filter queues based on manual inputs. Having this tool up and running from the get go made it easy to watch jobs get added and consumed from my test queue, and also easily flush out the queues as needed.

Filed under: Code, Kestrel, PHP, Technology, Zend Framework Continue reading

24Dec/104

GitHub Pages + Pirum = Easy PEAR Channel

I prefer managing my non-PEAR PHP dependencies (such as Zend Framework and PHPUnit) through PEAR channels when possible. It's much easier to manage component installation, upgrades, etc.. Managing and hosting a PEAR channel (using the Chiara_PEAR_Server) is not always that simple, and can add too much overhead for small projects. I like how Zend Framework leveraged google code to host its PEAR channel, and was able to update it simply through pushing to SVN, avoiding a web interface. Since I've been accumulating some components recently that really don't fit into pear.php.net, I figured it was time set up a PEAR channel for distributing them, but didn't want to host it myself or have to use a web interface. Turns out, it's really easy to do now.